Challenge

The team was developing many new features for the Palm OS and integrating them with an online user interface. The group was interested in understanding how users would best benefit from the features by examining how they organize their own personal information (such as their calendar, sharing with family, email, contacts, alarms, reminders, to do lists and synchronization), and how that data could be organized in a way that would benefit users.

Solution

We designed a task analysis study to evaluate the target customer’s demographics and current organizational habits, and how that information could be better organized to improve the efficiency of their lives, via the Palm product. The interviews spanned a significant sample of subjects from the targeted demographic segment, which raised our confidence in the results. Through usability evaluation, we found several areas where features could be organized to benefit users. Many of the findings resulted in features that are now standards used in the current Palm OS.