Michael DeVries

With the Apple iPhone demonstrating that a great design company could create a great wireless user experience and capture a large portion of the market while doing so, Google decided to move into the same space, albeit with an expanding eye, a.k.a more carriers and more handsets. Android, their answer to the iPhone OS, first made it's appearance on October 22, 2008.

A key driver of my evaluation was to understand just how well the device was going to take advantage of a more "open" web access and application developer OS.


Research Design

• Lead a three person team through a heuristic evaluation of the user experiences with a set of G1 tasks and experiences.
• Compare the G1 to the Apple iPhone and Sprint Samsung Instinct.

• The core of the evaluation was completed within three days, and a presentation was provided to Executives and other teams.
• Example finding: A web centric focus has provided the opportunity to turn common applications into data rich web applications. TuneWiki (on the right) not only replaces the out of the box music application (on the left), but provides free music, automatically looks up YouTube videos, and downloads the lyrics.

• Results of my work on the G1 also gained the attention of the Sales group. I was invited to sit on a Competitive Task Force in order to advise and consult on how to more effectively sell Sprint handsets against the competition.
  
  
• The evaluation of the G1 naturally identified several usability issues. These are often potential fodder for patent work, and in this case a visual impact issue evolved into a patent for "Enhancing Viewability of Information Presented on a Mobile Device." The essence of this patent (pending) is that the background can have an impact on the user's ability to understand those things in the foreground, and systems should be smart enough to compensate for that, even when the background is user selected. See more about this patent and others on my Patents and Pubs page.

• Proactive planning, scheduling, and prioritization
• Team evaluation facilitation
• Heuristic evaluation
• Building new ideas (exploring patent possibilities)
• Presenting to a group