A population perspective on mobile phone related tasks

This paper reports on three mobile phone related tasks carried out by participants in a large scale pilot survey carried out nationally, and in participants homes. The tasks selected represent activities common to mobile phone use, including menu selection styles, pressing small pushbuttons and connecting cables. The results include successful task completion data and subsequent participant ratings of ease of the task. The results are broken down by age and gender, and comparisons are made between tasks. In the paper prototyped menu selection tasks, older participants were considerably less successful than younger participants, although generally both the 'select and confirm' and 'number navigation' interfaces performed badly. In the button pressing tasks, participants fared better with the larger buttons, but the smaller buttons discriminated more against the older participant success rates. Headphone jack plug insertion was less successful than mini-USB plug insertion for most age groups, but was worse for female participants than male. The paper concludes that more research into some of the underlying factors is necessary, but it is clear that current mobile phone designs are failing older users.