Research On Usability Oriented Software Interaction Design Of Smart Phone

With the development of mobile computing, mobile handheld devices which take smart phone as a representative gradually become popular in people's daily life. Owing to its rich features and powerful processing capabilities, the smart phone gradually becomes a favorite product among a large amount of people. As a typical interactive product, the interaction design of smart phone gets much more concern and attention. However, smart phone which sets a number of functions in does not give users too much good experience during the process of interaction. On the contrary, more and more users are complaining that many features are too complex and difficult to use. Thus, in the interaction design of smart phone, it becomes a common concern that how to produce applications with high usability, which means applications are easy to use and can bring good experience to users.Usability refers to the capacity of the software product to be understood, learned, used and can bring good user experience during interaction process. It not only emphasizes the correct "look" that the application can provide to users, but also ensures users have good "feel" during the interaction process. Good usability is an organic unity of "look and feel", which determines the confidence of users for that product. During the interaction process of smart phones, the usability problems become more and more obvious:In one hand, in traditional way for design smart phone applications, it usually takes the desktop interaction paradigm as basics for mobile application design. This kind of design process ignores the context of mobile computing, leading to the application can meet functional goals, but usability is extremely poor. On the other hand, in the development process of the related theory about usability, there have been accumulated a lot of general guidelines about how to design a product with higher usability. But those guidelines are proposed based on desktop applications. While with the computing environment changes, they change accordingly. Some of them have been not suitable in the mobile computing, which have to be discarded or improved. This paper firstly points out the paradigm based on desktop can't meet the interaction demand of the mobile application. Transplanting desktop applications simply to smart phones may be inappropriate. The design of many existing mobile applications does not consider the interaction environment differences between desktop and mobile computing, which leading to the whole process of interaction is cumbersome and inefficient. That is to say the applications have poor usability. In order to solve this problem, after the analyzing of the interaction methods on mobile phone, the paper proposes an interaction paradigm that is suitable to smart phone; then through the discussion of the related theories about usability and interaction design, the paper firstly proposes general usability guidelines for mobile handheld devices, then discusses its usage in the design of mobile interface, finally basing on all the theories above, taking the interface switching system as an example, the paper demonstrates the usability oriented interaction design process of smart phone, meanwhile this paper provides the evaluation results of the system.