An Experimental Comparison of Two Popular PDA User Interfaces
Teresa Hübscher-Younger, Roland Hübscher, Richard Chapman · 2001
In this paper we compare the usability of the user interfaces of the two most widely used operating systems for personal digital assistants: Microsoft Pocket PC and Palm Computing PalmOS. In our experiment, we presented users with a sequence of six tasks that exercise the basic personal information management (PIM) functionality of the built-in applications and the basic operating system. Users were observed and questioned as they performed the tasks, and data about their actions was manually gathered by a human observer. Our results show significantly faster times when users perform the tasks with a PalmOS device versus a Pocket PC device. A majority of our test participants also stated a preference for the PalmOS device when asked about their impressions of the two interfaces afterward. 1