Jitterbug, a newcomer to the mobile phone industry realised that their products, handsets, were only one part of the overall mobile phone experience. They applied liberal doses of design thinking, coming up with usable features and simplicity to suit extreme users, like technophobes and aging consumers.

Providing familiar touchstones to ease the mobile-phone experience became a major part of Jitterbug’s design after early research showed that older users found conventions like signal strength meters unfamiliar and confusing. Instead, when you open a Jitterbug phone it emits—get this—a dial tone. “If there’s no dial tone, you can’t make a call,” Harris says. To reach a Jitterbug operator, who can place calls or answer questions for you, dial 0.

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Posted by: Justin Knecht

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 8:02 am and is filed under Article, Design thinking, Product design, Universal Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.