User-Centred Design (Re-design of Mobile Phone)

The Samsung SGH-D500 phone is typical of most phones found on the market today. It boasts a colourful display with many options and features. This can distract from the main reason that the majority of people use the phone for which is to make phone calls and send text messages. Although both these things are easily achievable with this phone for the vast majority of people, it doesn't cater for those few that have disabilities where their eyesight is affected. For them, the icons and text would appear too small to make out, and maybe even if they were colourblind the colours wouldn't be as apparent as they would be for people with 'normal' vision. Therefore, for this re-design project, I have decided to accomodate for those exact people and produce a prototype that incorporates these options and hopefully they would find more acceptable and easy to use.

I have added two extra buttons on the side of the phone that are easiy accessible and do two new features that the old phone lacked. They are a 'black/white' button that changes it from a colour display into black and white so the text is contrasted and easily decipherable against the black background. The second button is a zoom feature that allows th icons on the screen to appear much larger. I thought this was a better option than changing the size of the screen as it is quite large already.

I followed Jakob Neilson’s principle of only testing it on 5 people as any more would have not brought back much more useful comments. The prototype was tested on 5 different people. 4 men and one woman. I got them to use the phone and look at the prototype I had done so see if my improvements were worthwhile. They all had good vision but all agreed that the changes that I made would benefit visually-impaired people.

If I were to do the project again and had more time I would make a fully functional prototype with all the menus with the added features incorporated into the design as I only showed a brief mock-up. There was not much wrong with the phone but I managed to pick a few bad points and believe I suggested some good ideas.