Abstract:

This paper investigates the effect of respondents’ age in relation to the experience of using mobile phone for sending text messages. The text entry factors considered in the study were speed, special character selections, case conversions, simplicity, learnability, menu traversals and audio feedback. One hundred and ten Malaysians aged between 17 – 39 years old were interviewed. Special character selections, learnability and simplicity were found to be the three most important predictors for users’ texting satisfaction. Effects of age were significant for satisfaction towards learnability, speed and special character selections, with the younger respondents being more satisfied than the older respondents. Similarly, the younger respondents were also found to be more satisfied with their texting satisfaction than the older respondents. Results can be used by mobile phone designers and manufacturers to further improve mobile phone designs by focusing on important factors. This may increase their customers’ texting satisfaction.