The importance of usability in product choice: a mobile phone case study

Usability has become established as an important aspect of product design. This paper describes an investigation that was carried out to identify the importance of usability in product choice related to other product attributes. Interviews were initially carried out to identify possible attributes that contribute to product choice. Experiments were then undertaken using the methods of active information search, structured preference elicitation, ranking and interviews in order to find out what attributes were important to people when choosing an example product - mobile phones. It was found that usability is indeed important in product choice but perhaps not as much as users themselves believe. Other attributes that were found to be more important were features, aesthetics and cost. The process of product choice was found to be complex and it may be the case that people have come to expect usability in their products. Further research is needed to understand more fully the changing role of usability in product choice and to further improve the quality of the user-product relationship.