Wireless Informatics Forum

A new study from US-based Perceptive Sciences has pitted the iPhone against rivals, HTC Touch and Nokia N95 to find the king the usability.

A deep dive into the study shows just 10 test subjects where used – perhaps not enough for us to endorse this as gospel truth – but the test-cases are interesting and some nice results have been delivered.

The 10 testers, none of whom had used any of the devices in the past, were asked to perform a series of tasks; beginning with quantifiable actions such as finding the on/off button, setting the vibrate alert function, saving a new contact, taking a photo and navigating to a web page.

Perceptive Studies makes the valid point that the tests focused on how easy it was to pick up the device and use it right out of the box.

“People can eventually learn to use any device,” the company says. “But that’s not true usability. We wanted to see how long it took to figure out how to use the phones. That’s the difference between learnability and usability.”

You can read a full write-up of the study here. In summary, the iPhone won hand’s-down, with HTC running second and Nokia in last place.

Much of HTC’s success came, in part, because it runs the Windows Mobile OS. That means it looks and acts somewhat like desktop Windows, which many people are familiar with. People can choose between standard Windows Mobile navigation and using its touch-screen capabilities. The Nokia N95, however, suffered from too much complexity, even for basic tasks.

“You can access different menus from different locations, which can be disorienting,” Perceptive Studies said. “And common features are hard to find — turning the sound down, putting it on vibrate, things like that.”

The Nokia did claw-back some ground in ergonomics and look and feel with its solid construction. However, the report suggests that it took four hours to set up Wi-Fi on the N95, which was a fast, simple task on both the HTC Touch and the iPhone. That may be overkill but it was likely to be long enough that a typical user would abandon the service.