Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea (대한인간공학회지)

Ergonomics Society of Korea (대한인간공학회)
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Workflow-based Usability Evaluation of Mobile Phone Messaging Functions

작업흐름도 기반 휴대전화 메시지 기능 사용성 평가

  • 최재현 ((주)유투시스템) ;
  • 공용구 (성균관대학교 시스템경영공학과) ;
  • 정명철 (아주대학교 산업정보시스템공학부)
  • Published : 2007.11.30
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Abstract

This study evaluated the short message service (SMS) and multimedia message service (MMS) usability of mobile phones and wireless internet services by performance failure rates and flowcharts that adopted the concept of state diagrams. Forty-eight participants who had an experience of using mobile phones were recruited by posting an advertisement on websites for the experiment. They carried out both SMS and MMS tasks with the mobile phones of LG Cyon and Samsung Anycall as well as the wireless internet services of LGT ez-i, KTF magicN, and SKT NATE. In general, Cyon had the lower performance failure rate than Anycall for SMS, and ez-i had the lowest performance failure rate than the other services for MMS. More specifically through the workflow analysis, most participants used hot keys to take 7-8 steps to send a SMS including a symbol and had a difficulty in typing the symbol. They also took 10-11 steps to send a MMS after taking and attaching two pictures. Anycall, magicN, and NATE had significantly large error and failure rates due to the limited option of the menu paths that users could take and poor compatibilities of menu names and between menu and navigation keys. This study showed the possibility of use of flowcharts for systematic and specific usability evaluation methods and found the causes of performance errors and failures with mobile phones and wireless internet services to provide insight into their design.

Keywords

References

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