Mobile fiddling...(idea #107)

I think it was Jakob Nielsen who first identified (in one of the earliest WAP usability field trials) that a great "use" for mobile phones (actually for WAP) was killing time. It is hard not to notice that anywhere you go where there are people sitting waiting, they are usually fiddling with their mobile phone. Of course, some of this "fiddling" is actually doing stuff, like sending messages, cleaning up the folders, and so on. Other times it's adjusting anything that can be adjusted - ring tones, wallpapers, themes etc.

I've done it many times myself - take out my phone, even though I have no new messages or calls or any other change brought to my attention, and just start fiddling with it. Some people just like touching their phone, spinning it round and so on - that's supposedly why Motorola made the PEBL - something with a satisfying touch, just like a real pebble.

However, on close inspection (i.e peeking) at what some people do with their phones, the fiddling is a kind of mindless playing around - poking, changing, reverting back, going up and down menus, swapping settings back and forth, and so on - plain fiddling about. We like to tell kids not to fiddle with things - the remote control, the car controls, the radio, the computer. We often then go and do it ourselves (which doesn't mean the kids can too!) It seems we are born to fiddle. No doubt, psychologists, mobile ergonomists (human factors?) and other ologists know what this is all about and I'm slow to catch up, but I think they may have missed something.

I wonder, have we fully embraced this fiddling-thingy within mobile design, or are we treating it as an exception? In other words, do we think that only idle hands (and fingers) want to fiddle, so give them a game like Snake, or a news feed to the home page, and endless other variants of "time killer" apps (including Nielsen's "nothing better to do" WAP browsing, which it still as tedious as it ever was). Or, should we literally make it easier and give more options for simply fiddling around with the phone (the UI is the app)? I think that a UI designed for fiddling would be a different one that a UI designed for task-driven interaction. We could have two UIs. A playing around one (in pink - the new black) and a doing-stuff one (in the usual doing-stuff palette). Of course, that probably breaks all the UI and usability "rules", which is why it's probably an idea worth exploring.

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Tags: mobile phone, fiddling, idle, psychology, human factors, killing time