Demarcating Mobile Phone Interface Design Guidelines to Expedite Selection

Authors

  • Karen Vera Renaud University of Glasgow
  • Judy van Biljon University of South Africa, Pretoria

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18489/sacj.v29i3.438

Keywords:

Guidelines, mobile phone design, interaction design

Abstract

Guidelines are recommended as a tool for informing user interface design. Despite a proliferation of guidelines in the research literature, there is little evidence of their use in industry, nor their influence in academic literature. In this paper, we explore the research literature related to mobile phone design guidelines to find out why this should be so. We commenced by carrying out a scoping literature review of the mobile phone design guideline literature to gain insight into the maturity of the field. The question we wanted to explore was: “Are researchers building on each others’ guidelines, or is the research field still in the foundational stage?” We discovered a poorly structured field, with many researchers proposing new guidelines, but little incremental refinement of extant guidelines. It also became clear that the current reporting of guidelines did not explicitly communicate their multi-dimensionality or deployment context. This leaves designers without a clear way of discriminating between guidelines, and could contribute to the lack of deployment we observed. We conducted a thematic analysis of papers identified by means of a systematic literature review to identify a set of dimensions of mobile phone interface design guidelines. The final dimensions provide a mechanism for differentiating guidelines and expediting choice.

Author Biography

Karen Vera Renaud, University of Glasgow

Karen Renaud is a graduate of the Universities of Pretoria, South Africa and Glasgow. Her main research interest is Usable Security. She publishes widely in this area and collaborates with academics in the UK, South Africa and Canada. She also has interests in email usage in organisations, electronic voting and technology acceptance, specifically with respect to learning support systems.

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Published

2017-12-08

Issue

Vol. 29 No. 3 (2017)

Section

Research Papers (general)

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