Michael DeVries

The evaluation included the Apple iPhone, Verizon Voyager, Blackberry Pearl, Sprint Instinct, and Sprint LG Lotus in preparation for Marketing communications regarding the launch of the Lotus. The evaluation was a cross functional team exercise that included user experience, marketing, and project management. The results would assist VP personnel and MarCom in preparing for interviews the media. In addition, the information would provide Sales with talking points against the competition.

Research Design

• Variables: The phones and the services
• Method: Review the primary tasks in each of the services as well as the user experience and functional similarities/differences.
• I would conduct the initial evaluation, and a team of four others would review for area expertise and communication impact.

• The evaluation was completed in just over a week
• The evaluation supplied positive, negative, and neutral highlights across each device. The following table gives an example of results.

Communities/Social Network Feature Experience Differences
		Positive: There (were) 58 Social networking applications, supporting a wide variety of communities and interactions. Positive: The handset applications focus on communication, leaving the user to conduct maintenance tasks at the wired web site. Negative: Messaging communication is pulled, not pushed. Negative: While Friend Sync gets pictures from Facebook to your contact list, and Looped provides a contact's whereabout, no single application combines the view.
		Positive: Verizon announced (at that time) Social Life ($1.49 MRC), bringing multiple social networking sites to the same location for ease of access. This increases awareness of messages being sent to one service or another, greatly reducing the time and effort to check all of a user's social interactions. Negative: Pictures cannot (at the time) be uploaded from the photo albums. Neutral: There is no substantive difference in how Verizon and Sprint social networking WAP sites appear and behave.

• This report, along with others, highlighted the Competitive Usability Program's usefulness to Sales. I was invited to sit on a sales force team that focused on understanding how to sell Sprint devices against the competitors.
• Evaluations such as this provide an excellent opportunity to look at alternative solutions for both the user experience and the service or product design. The next step in the process could have been to explore this avenue.

• Knowledge of multiple handset design philosophies, tasks sequences, and funnctionality
• Cross functional team collaboration
• Heuristic evaluation
• Getting the job done to a tight timeline