Evaluation of user interfaces for displaying text messages on mobile devices

More and more information such as short text messages (SMS) or emails is stored on mobile phones. Retrieving the right information at the right time has become a difficult task when using traditional interfaces included in today's cell phones. We created two novel user interfaces (one textual and one graphical) and compared both to the classical interface for retrieving stored SMS messages in a 34-participant usability experiment. Both novel interfaces yielded significantly better results than the existing classical interface. Moreover, the results show that the novel textual interface, which groups messages by social contacts, outperforms the complex graphical interface, which displays messages in a chessboard-like grid. Both objective and subjective findings are in favor of the textual interface except for one result: The graphical interface is more enjoyable than the textual one.