A View on Cell Phone Design and Usability
Recently I bought a phone for my dad. Trying to teach him how to use it I realized how clumsy the interface was. Telling you the model or brand is worthless, almost every cell phone out there seems to be designed for people that like to invest a lot of time trying to discover features.
Some of the phones I tried at the shop made me think that some companies just put all the features possible into the smallest device possible without any usability test.
Is this the future?
A cell phone without zero… users don’t need that one, right?
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Well, I can tell you from my own experience that the iPhone does the job exceptionally well.
My dad is 75 and never used a cell phone, always used is land line phone. I gave him my iPhone and he used it like he owned it for years.
Why? How did he know how to use it? The answer: the commercials. Yes, the iPhone commercials focus on the usage of the device and not some fancy stylish feature or how things slide from one end out and then the other or how crazy it is to play MP3s on them.
Then I showed him the Nokia N95 and he could not make a call. The keys were way to small to read without his glasses, let alone too small to really press the right keys. He could read whats on the display, again without glasses. Without any help from my end he was totally lost in the strange menu layout. Which is really obscure even from my point of view.
I might sound like an Apple fanboy, but take you father to an Apple store or an AT&T store (or whereever you can let him play with an iPhone) and let him try that one. I think you will be surprised.
Oh my, so many typing and spelling errors
Hoba, thanks a lot for your valuable comment!
FYI…..some phone numbers have zeroes. However, I agree completely with the comments about excess features and feature hunting, esp. with the Blackberry.
Montie