Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

Thomas Wood thomas at openedhand.com
Wed Mar 12 12:18:20 CET 2008


On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 11:29 -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> >  > - more contact details
> >
> >  Such as? I didn't want to make it too complicated here. Phone, E-mail
> >  and Address and Company seemed the most likely used fields to me.
> 
> Don't even try to predict which ones are necessary:  it should be up
> to the user to define them.  When you select Add Field... a dialog or
> screen could pop up with combo-boxes for field name (with choices like
> Address, Phone, Email, or write your own), context (work, home,
> mobile, or write your own), and a multi-line text field (with at least
> 3 lines visible) for the value.
> 
[ long and verbose explanation cut for brevity ]

I agree, users will want to use and abuse the address book application,
and the best application will allow them to do that without being a
burden to the majority use cases. In the interests of getting something
stable and usable as quickly as possible, I opted to restrict the
features in the application.

[...]
> >  > > * Remove communication history page(?)
> >  >
> >  > So far everyone told me that this is a cool feature missing on all other
> >  > phones. I love it ;-)
> >
> >  Interesting, I guess I rarely look at my call history anyway. You can't
> >  do any thing with it, so I don't really see what it's usefulness is.
> 
> On my A1200 I use it a lot, mostly for calling back numbers in my
> "missed calls" list.  It's also nice to be able to redial a previous
> number from the dialed calls list.  I think of it as a short-term
> memory for contacts: I may not want to store someone's number
> permanently in the phonebook (long-term memory), but may need to play
> phone tag with a person for a day or two, until the business at hand
> is finished.  So if this list currently has no features, it needs to
> at least have a dial function (as with contacts: touch the number to
> enter it into the dialer).

Remember, this call history is per contact, in the address book. It
won't show you calls from unknown contacts. However, several people have
pointed out valid use cases for it (e.g. in the office context, "When
did I last call this person" could be quite important), so I think with
some added functionality it could be useful.

Regards,

Thomas
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