Designing quick & dirty applications for mobiles: Making the case for the utility of HCI principles

Many applications are currently being built for mobile phones that are intended as throwaway gimmicks that people download from places like Apple Appstore. Users can download small throwaway applications for their mobile phone for as little as ninety nine cents. We were interested in what effect these two components e.g. throwaway and cheapness have on the use of HCI guidelines by the designers of these applications and whether or not it was worth their while incorporating them into their design given the temporary nature of use. In this paper we describe how we tested two designs of the same concept. The first design brief was company-led and did not explicitly adhere to any HCI principles and the second was designed according to HCI principles. We tested both applications with users in the field to see which was the simplest and most intuitive to use.