Automatic Cell Phone Menu Customization Based on User Operation History

Mobile devices are becoming more and more difficult to use due to the sheer number of functions now supported. In this paper, we propose a menu customization system that ranks functions so as to make interesting functions including both frequently used and functions that are infrequently used but have the potential to satisfy the user, easy to access. Concretely, we define the features of the phone's functions by extracting keywords from the manufacturer's manual, and propose a method that uses the Ranking SVM (Support Vector Machine) to rank the functions based on user's operation history. We conduct a home-use test for one week to evaluate the efficiency of customization and the usability of menu customization. The results of this test show that the average rank at the last day was half that of the first day, and that the user could find, on average, 3.14 more kinds of new functions, ones that the user did not know about before the test, on a daily basis. This shows that the proposed customized menu supports the user by making it easier to access frequent items and to find new interesting functions. From interviews, almost 70% of the users were satisfied with the ranking provided by menu customization as well as the usability of the resulting menus. In addition, interviews show that automatic cell phone menu customization is more appropriate for mobile phone beginners than expert users.