P305 Usability of future pan-European Telecommunication Services

Rationale

Usability is an important issue when it comes to the marketability of telecommunication services. For improving this usability we have to pay attention to three factors: accessibility, user friendliness and commonality:

pan-European accessibility, because services will be required to be available throughout Europe user friendliness, in the sense of Human Factors research commonality, to allow all users to use services in similar ways throughout Europe These three aspects, when treated appropriately, will considerably add to the use of telecommunications services on a European scale.

Objectives
This project will investigate the possibility of setting up a series of guidelines in the above-mentioned three areas. These guidelines can then be used by developers of services to increase usability for the end user, and as a means to foster a general coherence between future services from different PNOs.

This work involves:

• Definition of a restricted set of services with existing or expected usability problems that this project will specifically aim attention at, to serve as a basis for the project work.
• Inventory of human factor aspects connected with those services, including: social aspects, psychological aspects and sensory motor aspects.
• Making an initial set of guidelines, specifically aimed at the services identified, based on Human Factors research.
• Specification of user profiles for the potential end users of these services.
• Experimenting with the set-up of the service access, based on these guidelines.
• Extension of the initial set of guidelines to a more generally applicable set. This set should allow user interfaces and equipment of future telecommunications services to be constructed so as to get a higher user acceptance.
• As a first target of this project and as an example of the usability of the guidelines, a service can be set up for, the following telephone user problem exists: "abroad, I usually don't know how to dial special services".
• A possible solution for this problem would be to have a telephone number (the 'NN' number, Nomen Nescio, No Number), unique across Europe which the caller is given in a very short time and in a language invariant way the four/five numbers he needs.

Participants NT TF NL AF PT BT IT

Duration - Project start: Apr 93 - Project completion: Sep 94

Results for Full Publication

Deliverable 1 - Recommendation on Usability
Deliverable 2 - Usability Prediction Tool (version 1)
Deliverable 3 - Final Deliverable