To reduce the risk and cost of such developments and to increase their potential competitiveness, it has become increasingly important for developers to utilise a perspective for their development that is rather user-oriented than a technology-driven. Considering the general market situation as well as the user’s needs and opinions, the product’s acceptance by the user, and, thus, its performance on the market, becomes more predictable. For this reason, a multi-phased international user trial was carried out by four European telcos within Eurescom project P1101 to gain insights into the user’s perspectives and integrate these findings into the development.

The project 'Device Unifying Service (DUS) aims at exploiting the characteristics of future broadband Always-On mass-market services. It was particularly explored how these new services can be accessed from any location and delivered to multiple heterogeneous devices, like cellular phones, laptops, PCs, PDAs, fixed line phones, MP3-players, digital cameras, and others. Though all the user’s various devices have different functionality and capabilities, they can act together as one "virtual terminal" with multiple input and output options. DUS is a potential enabling technology that will allow users to seamlessly switch between devices so that the same voice or data-oriented session may begin on one terminal and continues on another. Additionally, DUS offers the possibility to reduce the burden of terminal management, configuration, and customisation for the user. With the ever increasing number of these personal devices owned by individuals, the need to manage the complexity of communications, services, and devices and to tailor them to the individual’s lifestyle becomes more relevant to an increasing number of users.

To start with, it was decided to accompany the overall technical development from the user’s perspective: Firstly by conducting a two day workshop utilising the expert based method of SUNA (Strategic User Needs Analysis) to derive the user requirements through writing usage scenarios and – cases , then extracting the user’s needs taking the user’s and market perspective and finally building a user needs hierarchy for further requirement analysis and technical development.

For the other half of the participants, the first DUS prototype was used to conduct scenario-based usage cases, in which the user was asked to simulate real-life experiences and tasks in the lab. Along a common script, they played to be Peter, a business man who uses his different devices in his home, travel and office environment to organise his day and work. After each task they filled out a short questionnaire as well as a final questionnaire on overall satisfaction. They were then debriefed and re-invited for being a focus group. This Type B covered the same topics as Type A, but additionally going into more detail regarding their DUS experience and resulting ideas expectations, and feedback.

The findings given here are of temporary nature as they reflect the current status (October 2002) of the analysis, which will be finalised by December 2002. The samples drawn by the different partners were quite heterogeneous regarding the distribution of gender- and age, employment status, education level, as well as technology use and degree of mobility in their daily work. However, the users' perceptions of the DUS prototype itself and its capabilities, as experienced in the lab tests, were quite similar when viewed from a pan-European perspective. This apparent similarity of the user experience and feedback to the lab test contradicts the quite diverse user experiences and opinions found in the focus groups of each partner:

Users were keen on participating and helping companies to develop new solutions. Today’s technology leaves the user with a strong demand for synchronising and managing data between devices, to have access to their personal data from anywhere at any time, and to filter and manage private, business and public communication. Most of all, they demanded ease of use.

Generally, it was difficult for Type A users – without prior hands-on experience with the prototype – to fully understand DUS as a concept and the benefits it could provide in daily life. This needs to be considered in the marketing and communication strategy for the launch of such a complex service. On the other hand, the DUS experience proved to be a valuable basis to trigger fruitful discussions with Type B users. Both groups agreed on ease of use and moderate pricing as key demands. Privacy, data security, automatic profile management, emerged as well from the discussion.

You can find more technical information on the DUS project (P1101) at www.eurescom.de/public/projects/P1100-series/p1101/