I'd create target personas and then find target devices that the personas would use. Go interview students and find out what phones they are using.
Also, if you are forecasting out, look at what phones are coming out in the next year that also fit your personas. I'd recommend creating a technology profile of the target phone capabilities. Because there is such a wide range of phones in the market with varying capabilities, you need to think ask: 1) What markets are we supporting (US, international, etc) 2) What carriers are we targeting? 3) What are carrier restrictions on our product? (will vary depending on carrier, region) 4) Are we supporting legacy phones in the market? If so, how far back? (also, same model phone capabilities will vary from carrier to carrier) 5) Is this an offportal or on portal application? 6) What phone OS's are we supporting? 7) What are we prototyping in to create the interaction design? 8) What technologies are we supporting (Flash Lite, J2ME Midp1.0, Midp 2.0, WAP 1.0, Ajax, Browser support versions, etc) and building the apps in? I think that your marketing and technology groups could answer a lot of these questions. I personally like having an unlocked Nokia series 60 on hand because a lot of technologies port easily to the series 60 and it's easy to provision different apps on the phone and do demos. Additionally, having something that can hook up directly to a computer and display on a screen is also a really great feature for demos and usability test. My personal opinion is that while having an Iphone to test on sounds great, it's an unnecessary expense because only a small number of your user base is going to own one (unless of course you are specifically targeting Iphone users) It's overly expensive. I'd advocate minimizing your expenses on phones, getting just a couple phones, and working with whatever groups have the budget and the phones already (marketing, QA, sales), particularly if your core platform is not the mobile phone. Borrow those. Phone expenses can really get out of hand, so I'd recommend really trying to minimize them within the UX group. -Wendy ----- Original Message ---- From: Bryan Minihan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 16, 2007 8:06:28 AM Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Mobile device testing I'm planning out our product strategy over the next several months (we provide a social networking web app to connect high school athletes to college coaches) and we anticipate providing usable access to our site & features via handheld devices. This is future-planning, as we haven't spec'd out the work or design yet, but I'm trying to look ahead. My question is, if we anticipate at least SOME part of the mobile version will deliver highlight videos, and others will likely be RSS-style text alerts (who's new, who matches my saved alert, etc), which devices should we target for testing, in order to capture a pretty significant user base. Our primary personas fall in these categories: high school athletes & their fans (generally teenagers - approx 14-19), what I call "advocate fans" (parents & close friends helping the athlete get recruited), high school & college coaches (we're researching now, but estimating their ages fall in the 25-50 range). We're doing all of our UCD, architecture & development in-house, so I'm just assuming we'll need a few such devices for our user & compatibility testing. I would also really like an iPhone, but that's beside the point - if we can do this without purchasing one I'd be find with that =]. I checked the archives and did a brief Google search, but haven't found anything on the subject.thoughts? Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
