Title
A user study: the effects of mobile phone prototypes and task complexities on usability
Abstract
Mobile phones are increasingly becoming ubiquitous computational devices that are almost always available, individually adaptable, and nearly universally connectable (using both wide area and short range communication capabilities). Up to now, mobile phones have been used in purpose of the fact that we can send SMS messages among each other, save our important notes, save our schedules; connect to internet and so on. But how much can a mobile phone simplify our everyday interactions, before it itself becomes a usability burden? What are the capabilities and limitations of using mobile phones with different prototypes and complexities of the interaction items in itself. This paper presents a user study investigating the use of a prototypical, mobile phone based interaction system to send text messages and save schedules classified as simple and complex task settings. Our results show that mobile devices can greatly simplify our usage by using computer type prototypes with complex task settings. We have studied the effect of prototype of mobile phone and complexity of task for the usability test on subjective user evaluation. In this experiment, mobile phones with special software were given to test users (N=60) for a period of a week. Prototype design was done by using different kinds of platforms such as: paper, computer, and a fully operational appliance and also complexity of task was chosen as sending message and editing a saved schedule with the mobile phone, simple and complex task respectively. Later, a subjective user evaluation was measured in 5 points scale. Experiment results yielded that computer type prototype has significantly higher usability rate than paper type prototype and there is a significant interaction between prototype and complexity. Eventually, computer type prototype with complex task yielded highest rate while paper type prototype with simple task yielded lowest usability rates.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1655925.1655980
Int. Conf. Interaction Sciences
Keywords
Field
DocType
simple task,different prototype,complex task setting,task complexity,paper type prototype,mobile phone prototype,computer type prototype,prototype design,mobile device,user study,mobile phone,subjective user evaluation,complex task,interface design,ubiquitous computing,hci,usability testing,usability
Mobile technology,Mobile computing,Mobile search,Mobile station,Computer science,Usability lab,GSM services,Human–computer interaction,Mobile phone,Mobile Web,Multimedia
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.42
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ibrahim Furkan Ince1134.13
Yucel Batu Salman2193.85
Mustafa Eren Yildirim351.53