A Population Perspective on Mobile Phone Related Tasks

For design to be truly inclusive, it needs to take into account the range of users’ capabilities. To do this appropriately, good data on those capabilities is needed. This paper reports on results from a postcode sampled survey of 362 people. The survey examined a wide range of user capabilities and characteristics, but the paper focuses on just a few of the survey measures. These measures examine some of the component activities involved in using mobile telephones: selection of a menu item via two different interaction patterns, use of differing sized pushbutton controls and insertion of two different types of electrical connector. These results can help to inform more inclusive design of mobile phones by examining how people’s capability to perform these activities varies across different activities and by age and gender.