Study Looked at Three Types of Phone Owners
Our study involved data from 60 participants who were asked to enter specific text messages and complete several mobile device tasks. Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners who owned their phones for at least one month. Twenty more participants were owners of traditional hard-key QWERTY phones and another twenty were owners of numeric phones who used the “multi-tap” method of text entry.
Participants were brought in for 75 minute one-on-one usability sessions with a moderator. Each participant entered six fixed-length text messages on their own phone. Non-iPhone owners also did six messages each on the iPhone and a phone of the “opposite” type. The opposite phone for numeric phone owners was a Blackberry and for hard-key QWERTY phone owners it was a numeric Samsung E300 phone. Some participants did additional tasks, including a contact search and add contacts, as time allowed.
