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Abstract
The effective utilization of a communication channel like calling a person involves two steps. The first step is storing the contact information of another user, and the second step is finding contact information to initiate a voice or text communication. However, the current smartphone interfaces for contact management are mainly textual; which leaves many emergent users at a severe disadvantage in using this most basic functionality to the fullest. Previous studies indicated that less-educated users adopt various coping strategies to store and identify contacts. However, all of these studies investigated the contact management issues of these users from a qualitative angle. Although qualitative or subjective investigations are very useful, they generally need to be augmented by a quantitative investigation for a comprehensive problem understanding. This work presents an exploratory study to identify the usability issues and coping strategies in contact management by emergent users; by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. We identified coping strategies of the Pakistani population and the effectiveness of these strategies through a semi-structured qualitative study of 15 participants and a usability study of 9 participants, respectively. We then obtained logged data of 30 emergent and 30 traditional users, including contact-books and dual-channel (call and text messages) logs to infer a more detailed understanding; and to analyse the differences in the composition of contact-books of both user groups. The analysis of the log data confirmed problems that affect the emergent users’ communication behaviour due to the various difficulties they face in storing and searching contacts. Our findings revealed serious usability issues in current communication interfaces over smartphones. The emergent users were found to have smaller contact-books and preferred voice communication due to reading/writing difficulties. They also reported taking help from others for contact saving and text reading. The alternative contact management strategies adopted by our participants include: memorizing whole number or last few digits to recall important contacts; adding special character sequence with contact numbers for better recall; writing a contact from scratch rather than searching it in the phone-book; voice search; and use of recent call logs to redial a contact. The identified coping strategies of emergent users could aid the developers and designers to come up with solutions according to emergent users’ mental models and needs.
Highlights
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have traditionally been designed for office-environment for professional and educated people who are referred to as traditional users [1]
We investigated the contact management issues faced by emergent users in Pakistan
We first conducted an interview study which indicated that emergent users are at a disadvantage at these basic tasks and they use several coping strategies to help them in these tasks
Summary
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have traditionally been designed for office-environment for professional and educated people who are referred to as traditional users [1]. The rapid decrease in prices of ICTs artifacts over the past few decades trickled them down to poor and less educated people having diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds [1,2,3]. These are referred to as emergent users, and they are disadvantaged in terms of capabilities to access, learn, and operate ICT artifacts [1]. These users often belong to developing countries and have lower education and limited technology exposure. Emergent users were found to use voice communication mainly for maintaining their social connections [13]
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