Stalking the Wild Youth: Mobile Phone Design for Teenagers

Watching teens use phones in their natural environments gave a group of researchers insights into how future handsets aimed at the youth market should be designed.

People often confuse what they want with what they need when it comes to consumer products. Manufacturers try to collect this information through interviews, but observing users’ behavior in their natural environment can provide better insights. The science of ethnography, studying how people in a culture interact with each other and the environment, can be an ideal tool to learn how teenagers use mobile phones and to help shape designs to cater to them.

Last year, a team of researchers -- Sara Berg of Interaction Design Department at Umea University in Sweden, Alex S. Taylor of the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey in England and Richard Harper of UK design consultancy The Appliance Studio -- went to a sixth-form college in England and for five months observed the way a group of students used their mobile phones. The researchers used these observations, along with periodic interviews, to come up with a concept for a 3G mobile phone that addressed their findings.

While observing teens in their natural habitat – campus commons, dining halls, parks, hallways – the researchers came to the conclusion that mobile phones were not only used

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