A User Study: The Effects of Mobile Phone Prototypes and Task Complexities on Usability

摘要

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.