STUDY OF ADDRESS BOOKS - I

User type: housewives in the age group of 30-45, graduates, and use their mobile phones for calling and recieving calls only.

Location: Harihar town, Karnataka.

Observations:

1. The phone entries in the diary are made by all the family members, its in English and following the alphabetical order of the diary in most places.

2. The names followed with either the profession of the contact or the location, for unique identification, as shown in figure 1.

3. Notes, like the availability of the person, direction to the address, etc. are added, as shown in figure 1.
DESIGN IDEA: Possibilty of writing notes/ extra info about contacts- location maps, addresses, birthdays, etc.



figure 1

4. The nicknames are also added as to identify the contacts.

5. Sometimes, when noting down in a hurry, the alphabetical order is broken, as shown in figure 2 below.

figure 2

6. The numbers, when wriiten in a hurry, were written on the top of the page, so as not to disturb the order, and also to search easily later on.

7. Some were just numbers without any names, and the user identified the number as that of her sister's by remebering the last 3 digits, as in figure 3. The user dialled this number atleast once a day- hence could easily remeber the number.
DESIGN IDEA: A Phone book based on frequency of calls- where the user can just remeber the numbers easily...

8. The names in the address book were followed by the abbrevated locations in brackets (figure 3), for easy identification of the contacts, and also the brackets distinguished the loactions from names.
DESIGN IDEA: Contacts could be arranged according to the locations...
9. Similar technique was observed while writing STD codes - to distinguish from the phone numbers and to identify easily the location of contacts.
figure 3

10. The change of numbers are indicated by different colors and different size of writing (figure 4). This is to identify the changed numbers. DESIGN IDEA: Space for marking change of numbers and usage of colors to identify the change?



figure 4


11. The names of the contacts written on the top page, are highlighted by marking a box around them (figure 5) to identify important contacts. Also, these numbers are written breaking the diary's aplhabetical order - these were noted down while taking numbers on the call.
DESIGN IDEA: A quick access - notepad to jot down numbers when on call, which could be later updated to the phonebook...

figure 5

12. The user also had doodled the figure of a person while noting down the number on the phone (figure 5).

DESIGN IDEA: icons that the user could create/ draw for a particular contact name.