Measuring Usability Issues on PDA's

Motivation

   People are using PDA’s everyday. They take them to work, store phone numbers, email, shopping lists, and all manners of personal and work related information on them. But how is this information accessed and manipulated on handheld devices? The metaphors used – windows, scrolling, buttons and other interface widgets – are an extension of the same components from a desktop with a very large screen. Usability studies should be done on common interface widgets on a handheld computer to aid designers of applications in building user-friendly applications.

    Not a lot of work has been done on this question of PDA interfaces and usability to this point. The question can be asked about whether pen based interfaces for small screen devices follow the same usability and design guidelines as that of a large screen mouse based interface. Researchers should study the interactions of people with these pen-based devices and attempt to evaluate whether the standard metaphors being used are still effective.

    In addition to testing the widgets for applicability, researchers should also attempt to establish design guidelines for building applications of small screen pen based interface devices. For example, one common interaction on large screens is scrolling. The question can be asked whether scrolling on a small screen with a stylus is as effective as scrolling on a large screen with a mouse. In the area of information visualization designers often try to provide a focus and a context in their displays. Can a technique like this be used on small screens by taking away precious screen space in order to provide additional context to a user without a large performance hit?

Experiment

    This study was designed to examine selecting items from a list as this task repeatedly comes up in common Palm Pilot and Pocket PC applications. For selecting items by scrolling, different sized lists as well as a full and half size screen were used. The intent being to gather information about whether designers could sacrifice some real estate while still testing the effectiveness of scrolling in general. Other metaphors for selecting items from a list were also tested, namely a tab control and  tree interface. These were also tested with different sized lists to see if guidelines could be developed for PDA application designers.

Results

Coming Soon!