Designing Generation Y Interactions: The Case of YPhone

Background

With more and more products becoming digital, mobile, and networked, paying attention to the qualities of interactions with is also getting more relevant. While interaction qualities have been addressed in several scientific studies, little attention is being paid to their implementation into a real life, everyday context. This paper describes the development of a novel office phone prototype, YPhone, which demonstrates the application of a specific set of Generation Y interaction qualities (instant, playful, collaborative, expressive, responsive, and flexible) into the context of office work. The working prototype supports office workers in experiencing new type of interactions. It is set out in practice in a series of evaluations. We found that the playful, expressive, responsive, and flexible qualities have more trust than the instant and collaborative qualities. Qualities can be grouped, although this may be different for different products that are evaluated, so researchers must be cautious about generalizing. The overall evaluation was positive with some valuable suggestions to its user interactions and features.