In a previous blog, Chrystel demanded the end of useless interface functions and I thought it would be interesting to follow her lead and identify which of my cellphone’s functions I really used.<br /><br />Here is my technological profile: I work with my laptop computer which is connected to wireless Internet, I listen to the radio and to music on the Internet, I communicate through email, Skype and my cellphone. I use technology for practical reasons and don’t have time to explore hidden functions or those that I can’t understand on the first try. Technology must be useful to me and nothing less will do.<br /><br />My experiment covers a one-year period with a LG5550 cellphone containing 79 functions.<br /><br />The results of this little study are that of the 79 available functions:<br /><ul>   <li>7 are frequently used; </li>   <li>12 are only used once, meaning they’re used at the time of activation;</li>   <li>60 are never used; </li>   <li>18 are useful – the same ones that are used often and to activate the phone, minus the function to download ringtones which I consider more fun than useful ;=) </li> </ul> To summarize this exercise, there’s a lot of noise surrounding my daily tasks, I only use 24% of the available functions and the value added of the remaining 76% is yet to be seen in my everyday use.<br /><br />Along the way, I discovered a few hidden functions like the plane mode (?) and voice recognition which could sometimes be useful (but is only available in English).<br /><br />What would I like to see in the future?<br /><ul>   <li>To be able to download, at my discretion, the functions that are useful to me.</li>   <li>To be able to personalize my user interface (if it’s not already possible with other cellphones) by grouping the frequently used functions under one menu. This would avoid the constant back and forth between different menus when you are looking for a specific function. See attached usability table in <a href=”https://yucentrik.ca/fr/pdf/tableau-fonctionnalites.pdf”>pdf</a> format (sorry available just in French). </li> </ul>