Users' needs for social tagging and sharing on mobile contacts

Abstract

In this paper we describe our research toward improving the current mobile contacts applications, which we found to lack important features that are essential to a fully satisfactory user experience. We identify the needs for a better user experience for organizing and searching, as well as looking for information from one's social network. We present the results of a user study that identified the problems with the current mobile contacts applications and propose tagging contacts and social network information sharing as the mechanism for improving their usability and usefulness.

Mobile Usability: Experiences From Iran and Turkey

“…How users organize their mobile phone contact list may reflect the society in which they are living. Nguyen and Oh (2010) found that approximately half of the Korean users in their study organized their mobile device contacts into groups, and four of 86 Korean respondents wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies. In our study we had indications from the Turkish focus group that users wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies, but it turned out in the usability test that they could not use the contact list applications to do so, not even the simple feature of marking "favorites" as level one in a two-level hierarchy of contacts.…”

“…They called this type of information "cues" and developed and evaluated a prototype in which the contact list application shares "cues" of users' current status. Nguyen and Oh (2010) proposed the ability of tagging contacts on smartphones and evaluated a related prototype. They found that approximately half of Korean users organized their mobile device contacts into groups, and four of 86 Korean respondents wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies.…”