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Mobile research strategies for a global market

Published: 01 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The user-centered design focus at Microsoft has evolved in parallel with emerging mobile technologies. We started with a Contextual Inquiry (CI) initiative in 1997 to gather mobile communication and information requirements in the Northwest U.S. Later, as users adopted wireless data services---Short Message Service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), mobile instant messenger, and email clients---the focus turned to more specific usage issues in key international markets. This article presents an overview of the evolution of the qualitative field research methods that have been used to respond to increasingly global research requirements.1

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Constantin S Chassapis

This article follows the field methods used by Microsoft during the upsurge of wireless device usage, and is a pleasant narrative of field research, product design, and ethnography. Microsoft launched a contextual inquiry (CI) initiative in 1997. The CI is an observation method in which the researcher, clothed in the role of an apprentice, "is learning how activities are performed from an expert" (the person or social group under observation). Paramount in the effectiveness of Microsoft's approach was the hiring and steady use of anthropologists. The author describes, for example, how, "by observing the use of paper artifacts in relation to mobile phone calls and information requirements[,] we developed a model of requirements for Windows Mobile-based products." Anthropologists will certainly occupy significant seats from now on in the product design teams, and field research will be conducted incessantly to align with continuous technological innovations. What happened at Microsoft is, in some respect, that some old dogs learned new tricks, although it is not entirely clear who the old dogs are in this context (the product design teams or the anthropologists) and what the new tricks are (aligning a product to a market, discovering people's needs so as to create new products, or the very use of methods and skills from ethnography and anthropology). If you are a usability engineer, reading this article will be fruitful and informative; if you are a manager in a product design team, this article is a must-read. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 48, Issue 7
Designing for the mobile device
July 2005
92 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/1070838
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2005
Published in CACM Volume 48, Issue 7

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  • (2007)Enterprise Library Management for Digital Media with Dynamic Media Synthesis2007 2nd International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing10.1109/ISWPC.2007.342632Online publication date: Feb-2007
  • (2007)Capturing Mobile Phone Usage: Research Methods for Mobile Studies2007 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference10.1109/IPCC.2007.4464062(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2007
  • (2006)A framework for mobile disease report and investigationProceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile technology, applications & systems10.1145/1292331.1292368(33-es)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2006
  • (2006)Low-fi prototyping for mobile devicesCHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1125451.1125592(694-699)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2006
  • (2006)Diversified users’ satisfaction with advanced mobile phone featuresUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-006-0028-x5:2(239-249)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2006

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