Emergent smartphone users' dataset

The effective utilization of a communication channel like calling a person
involves two steps. The first step is storing the contact information of
another user, and the second step is finding contact information to
initiate a voice or text communication. However, the current smartphone
interfaces for contact management are mainly textual; which leaves many
emergent users at a severe disadvantage in using this most basic
functionality to the fullest. Previous studies indicated that
less-educated users adopt various coping strategies to store and identify
contacts. However, all of these studies investigated the contact
management issues of these users from a qualitative angle. Although
qualitative or subjective investigations are very useful, they generally
need to be augmented by a quantitative investigation for a comprehensive
problem understanding. This work presents an exploratory study to identify
the usability issues and coping strategies in contact management by
emergent users; by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative
approaches. We identified coping strategies of the Pakistani population
and the effectiveness of these strategies through a semi-structured
qualitative study of 15 participants and a usability study of 9
participants, respectively. We then obtained logged data of 30 emergent
and 30 traditional users, including contact-books and dual-channel (call
and text messages) logs to infer a more detailed understanding; and to
analyse the differences in the composition of contact-books of both user
groups. The analysis of the log data confirmed problems that affect the
emergent users’ communication behaviour due to the various difficulties
they face in storing and searching contacts. Our findings revealed serious
usability issues in current communication interfaces over smartphones. The
emergent users were found to have smaller contact-books and preferred
voice communication due to reading/writing difficulties. They also
reported taking help from others for contact saving and text reading. The
alternative contact management strategies adopted by our participants
include: memorizing whole number or last few digits to recall important
contacts; adding special character sequence with contact numbers for
better recall; writing a contact from scratch rather than searching it in
the phone-book; voice search; and use of recent call logs to redial a
contact. The identified coping strategies of emergent users could aid the
developers and designers to come up with solutions according to emergent
users’ mental models and needs.