Last week, I was dealing at this point with the aspect of communication with respect to addressbook 2.0. Doing so, it has been stressed that the prime benefit from centralizing and interconnecting communication and contacts is convenience. However, why comfort is that important and unfortunately, has often been neglected so far, is supposed to be referred to in this article.
Convenience is everything that makes for an easier life and as Wikipedia states: a facility is comfortable due to its possibilities and its equipment with objects if its reduces men’s work and can offer coziness (WIKIPEDIA n.d.).
Unfortunately, in the status quo of contact administration and communication, comfort frequently cannot be found to the actually possible extent. The following points are supposed to clarify this statement.

1. Separating the communication channels
By separating the different communication channels, the user still has to change the applications for different forms of communication and he cannot use the data system wide. To give an example, please let me mention a complete e-mail client with web synchronization. To do so, I have to open a new application on the cell phone and unfortunately,  I also cannot use it with my phonebook. With the utmost probability, many users, however, will not perceive this as being convenient. Next week, I am going to dwell on the convergence topic at this point.

2. Not using information available
Up to now, the information available unfortunately is used rather rarely, partly due to lacking integration in order to improve the user experience. To give an example, please let me mention a telephone call and an e-mail to write. Why is the user not suggested the recipients who have top priority for him and not just an address book starting at A. like in Anderson and ending with Z. like in Zaza? The same is true for conversations, as the user should also be interested in obtaining relevant information about his dialog partner. Last week, I gave the example that the profile or the e-mails last sent or received are being displayed to me during a conversation matching the corresponding contact.

3. Data security
Any cell phone user should be able to understand the fear to lose all his contact details. But why are most synchronization solutions  applications with one single purpose: the user has to initiate synchronization himself instead of having it work automatically in the background. In addition, synchronization only makes sense if all  contact details are administered in one place so that not only contact fragments are saved. And if these are saved right away, saving the communication history (e.g of an e-mail) itself would be interesting, too.

4. Usability
By addressing the above-mentioned problems, there is the danger of preparing an application fraught with features. However, comfort is only generated by reducing the features truly relevant to added value, so that the complexity of technology does not constrain its use. The main task should be to design a lean application clearly geared to the users, also taking into account the user’s individual particularities.

When designing the cellity Communicator, we have addressed these issues to provide the user with a higher degree of comfort. cellity users will be able to use all of their contacts and all of their communication anywhere. Doing so, they can rely on data security and experience high comfort when using this tool. We are currently investigating in an acceptance and usability study, to what extent we do hit the targets we have set for ourselves and what details may need reworking to be able to offer the promised user experience at launching.

Next week, I am going to write on the subject of convergence already addressed above.

Joerg Land

Prodcut - cellity AG

Kategorien: Insider News, Press, Presse, Trends, Mobile, Allgemein
Tags: cellity, mobile 2.0, cellity Communicator, addressbook 2.0, Joerg Land