Aldo Reolon
November 7th 2002, Montegrotto, Italy

Aldo came from a Italia Telecom Lab where a mix of social sciences were to be fund. One question they were currently asking is whether people are ready to understand UMTS — what they might do with more bandwidth in 3G services. The Lab used a user-centred approach: which included stages of defining user requirements through create brainstorming, getting feedback about the ideas generated from a panel of users, specifying what prototype innovations should have, emulating them on a touch screen PC, evaluating their usability in the lab and conducting a field evaluation to identify which service concepts are more appealing and to identify the target markets.

Brainstorming took place with 6 groups drawn from the cities of Turin, Rome and Naples. Covering 25–55 year olds, a balance of males and females, business and residential uses. This helped to identify latent needs, whether different target groups (e.g. business vs. residential) had different requirements and potential services and features of a hypothetical terminal. The results were:

• People showed a strong interest in combining different things in one terminal (e.g. camera, videocamera, organiser, diary).
• They wanted a terminal to help optimise their time use, to help save time (e.g. in their interactions with public bodies, theatre booking, informing them of traffic problems)
• Security was important, in the sense of having a secure network.
• The wanted to be able to use the same terminal in different contexts: at home, in the office, in the car, in other environments.
• The wanted to merge different payment tools (credit card, bankomat).

242 ideas emerged, which were then grouped into categories:

• The reception/transmission of images and video.
• Interaction/messaging.
• Information (push and pull).
• Payment/Purchases.
• Teleworking.
• Control.
• Games/entertainment.
• Enhanced phone services.

Next, to construct the Ôcreative panelÕ they started by contacting by phone 100 people who had medium to high education and who were technofans. Using a screening questionnaire to get the more creative people they then selected 30 of these half male, half female with a good knowledge of technology and disposable income. These 30 each took two tests. These were the Torrance Test of Creativity Thinking to evaluate their creativity and the Gordon Personal Profile Inventory (GPP-I) to evaluate their personal profile according the following characteristics: responsibility, authority, sociability, original thinking and personal relationship. This lead to a panel of 14 customers. The result of the deliberations was the specifying of a prototype.

At the next stage 16 people were involved in usability tests. They carried out tasks with the prototype in an experimental setting e.g. if one wanted to go from Turin to Milan, the terminal could be used to show the route. Those involved had to explain what they were doing as they tried to carry out the task and indicate any problems they faced. In addition, there was a questionnaire afterwards.

This helped define a number of ergonomic issues they needed to address (the design of the terminal, its dimensions and the dimensions of the display and the comprehensibility of the functions keys) and usability issues (the procedures you had to go through to use the services, the ease of navigation, the speed of interaction with the stylus and the clarity and learnability of graphical and textual elements. In general, feedback was very positive.

The field evaluation to test the concept consisted of two focus groups, one in Rome and one in Turin. They estimated usage, adoption rates, identified early adopters, decided the main benefits for different users and what was appropriate for different target groups and how demand might change according to the different pricing of services.

The concepts that emerged were:

• Enhancing audio communication to enable them to see the people called Ñ the videocall.
• Improving quality of life by services that helped reduce queuing, provide traffic information, information about the nearest services or about other local interesting things.
• Enhancing messaging, by allowing longer messages, attached files, audio input to type messages.

The key usability elements that people wanted for all services was localisation, a good response time, customisation and frequent updating of information. The services were located on a grid whose axes were usefulness to entertainment and Ôalternative bearer services' to comfort.

On the whole, the involvement of users through all the stages has been evaluated as being a very useful experience within the Lab.