Development of Smart Phone Usability Benchmarking Tasks

The adoption of smart phones and other mobile devices has been rapid, with shipments of new mobile devices now surpassing those of PCs. While usability benchmark tasks for PCs have been established, the new interfaces presented by smart phones and other mobile devices are significantly different from those in use on PCs. We therefore conducted a Delphi-method study among smart phone users and potential users to develop three sets of benchmark tasks for assessing usability in smart phones (and, by extension, other mobile devices), including a general task set and task sets specific to current smart phone users and non-users. We also find that while there are a great many possible uses for smart phones, there are relatively few tasks that are used with great frequency. These task sets and findings should facilitate further research into mobile device usability and enable practitioners to better focus usability improvement efforts.