UsabilityNJ
The New Jersey UPA Chapter

Meeting Details for January 23, 2008

The next meeting of UsabilityNJ will be held on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at Logical Design Solutions, 131 Madison Ave., Morristown, NJ (click for directions). The meeting will be in the Executive Conference room on the 2nd floor.

Social hour starts at 6:30 PM. Presentation starts at 7:00 PM.

Please RSVP to rsvp [at] usabilitynj [dot] org if you plan to attend the meeting.

Talk Summary

The well-publicized launch of Apple’s iPhone with its multi-touch user interface was the subject of a program of research conducted by User Centric. Many articles were written on the “wow” factor of the iPhone, but almost all reviews were based on opinion or anecdotal references. User Centric’s objective was to assess the iPhone’s usability from a more rigorous user experience research perspective. In short, the goal was to assess performance, satisfaction and usage employing quantitative and qualitative measures with actual users who were naïve to the testing procedures and purposes.

The results from this series of studies will be discussed at this session. With each study, key objectives were defined with specific measures, methodologies and participant groups to target device features and interactions. Each study will be described in detail with time for questions from the audience. The session will emphasize the text entry portion of the research, but will include:

• Findings from studies with iPhone owners one week after the iPhone’s U.S. product launch
• Findings from studies with iPhone owners after a month of experience
• Comparisons of performance with naïve or “walk-up-and-use” users
• Text input differences comparing:
  • iPhone’s touch keyboard
  • Standard 12-button mobile phone keypad
  • Advanced mobile devices with a full QWERTY keyboard
• User preferences and attitudes toward the iPhone itself
• User performance with iPhone features

The findings of some of the early studies have been published. As with any research where opinion, conjecture, and pundits are abundant, some of the findings have generated controversy.

For example, the iPhone was found to have a statistically significant negative performance for “walk-up-and-use” text input using its touch keyboard compared to performance on a device with a physical QWERTY keyboard. Surprisingly, no text input performance differences were found with first time users on the iPhone compared to their standard mobile phone’s text input system. However, our studies found that after one week of iPhone ownership, text input performance was significantly more efficient than the phone they had previously owned just one week earlier.

Speaker Bio