Interface Report of a Windows Phone Address Book

ITMD 534: Human Computer Interaction, HW2

Illinois Institute of Technology, School of Applied Technology

September 28, 2015

Interface report of a Windows phone address book

Alberto González Trastoy

In the following document the human/computer interaction between different kind of users and a mobile phone address book application will be analyzed.

Product and interface description

The product is a Nokia Lumia 920 Smartphone with the windows phone 10 operative system. The interface of the address book is apparently acceptable in visual terms, with icons clearly identifiable, user control, freedom and it has a minimalistic design. However, as it will be analyzed below, there are some problems in flexibility and some standards which are not in this application UI.

Task

In this task the user will perform the main actions used in a smartphone address book. First, the user will have to add a contact to the address book. Once this task is done, he/she will have to go back to the main menu and delete this user from the address book. Below there are the two analysis of different persons -one expert and one unfamiliar with the product- interacting with this address book UI (User interface):

A) User A: Alejandro

Persona details

Alejandro is 24 years old guy from Spain who has a background in IT. He is a student with previous experiences with smartphones and he uses the smartphone for being in touch with people every day. He has been previously an Android user and now he is an IPhone user. He is totally familiar with address book phone applications, however, he has never used Windows phone OS and he is unfamiliar with the windows phone address book interface.

Performance

The performance of the user A, although he was fluent with the device, he made mistakes in almost all the steps of the task. This is due a small differences in some actions, which depend on the smartphone manufacturer and SO. He immediately recognized the phone symbol as the address book (Num. 1). Regarding the performance it is important to note that the full task was finished in 8 minutes and the user spent 5 minutes for deleting a user from the address book (Num. 9-10). Below, there is a flow chart of the adding a new contact process:

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 Figure 1. Flow chart of user A adding a new user in the mobile phone adress book and deleting it. Red color represents unecesary operations did by the user.

Main problems

First problem was observed at the beginning of the task. For unblocking the device there was a button placed on the right of the phone instead of the top, where it is more usual to be placed. However, he was able to figure it out in few seconds and proceeded with the task. Another problem appeared just after accessing into de address book App, the user wanted to save a new contact but he tried to do it by clicking the agenda symbol button which leaded him to a contact list where he could see the contacts only but not adding new ones (Num. 2-3).