Publication
Design and Usability for Personalized User Interfaces of Telecommunication Services
Gesche Joost; Roman Englert
2007.
Abstract
Today user interfaces become very complex due to a rich functionality, especially services in the telecommunication area. As a consequence users neglect most of the possible functions. Till now investigations in the area of usability engineering did not yet solve this challenge. We propose a new personalization approach that incorporates design and engineering in order to reduce the amount of features of an interface. The personalization is received by determining in a first step the features of an interface that can be adapted to users’ habits and preferences. In a second step these features are mapped to input/output modalities which are chosen by the user. This personalization method is based on the conceptual model of stepping stones that combines usability engineering with design. Usability engineering applies an iterative model to ease the usage of interfaces. Within this iterative model the stepping stones incorporate design in order to make the usage of service interfaces more intuitive.
The developed model of the stepping stones is applied to a configuration manager for cellular phones. Users can easily configure his/her personal menu structure, can add his/her favorite features and style or can delete unused features that he/she does not want to have on the phone. Finally, the configuration manager interface and its design are evaluated based on a scenario for three different user groups.