Mobile handset designers should look to social networking for inspiration to improve the management of communications on phones. So says BulkSMS managing director, Dr Pieter Streicher. He maintains that many aspects of the mobile phone user interface havent changed in 10 years, especially contact management and SMS functionality.

Naomi Barons 2009 study into mobile phone behaviour highlighted the “reachability conundrum” in consumers attitudes to always being in touch. Reachability was one of the aspects of the mobile phone that users liked the most, and the least. People were finding it more difficult to separate their work life from leisure time.

To help solve this issue, says Streiher, designers and manufacturers can learn from the way social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to manage their contacts, build lists and unfriend or unfollow people.
The creation of groups of contacts, for example, ‘Work’, ‘Family’, would allow people to separate work and leisure time. They would have the ability to respond to calls differently at different times, so, for example, a work call received after hours could be replied to via SMS asking the caller to respond in the same way. Some of this functionality is starting to appear on phones, but none of it is fully integrated yet, Streicher says.

Streicher also suggests that users should be able to search their messages. With more businesses using SMS to send customers important information such as reference or account numbers, customers want to be able to quickly the find information in their saved messages.

Delivery reports, which are currently stored separately to messages, should be integrated with the sent message, allowing the user to easily see whether or not a message has been delivered. And while some smartphones do allow the user to list text messages as a threaded conversation, similar to the way that Instant Messaging software behaves, this capability should be introduced as a matter of course to better reflect how people use messaging.

“It doesnt make sense that handset manufacturers havent kept pace with the way consumers behave,” says Streicher. “This could be explained by SMS not being intended to be a commercial service – it was something that evolved more or less by accident. But its popularity amongst users, and its growing adoption as a major business tool, means that SMS and messaging behaviour should really be a critical factor directing handset designers.”