ABSTRACT
Although today’s users of mobile phones are afforded increasing control as the popularity and
richness of information provided by smartphones increases, how these users make choices and
evaluations cannot be explicitly expressed. This study uses an acute observation of designers of
technology and aesthetics to conduct a mental-model analysis of smartphones with the purpose of
explicitly identifying the differences in the schemas of users. This study also modifies the mental
model to evaluate the practicability of the mental model. Hence, this study investigates groups of
subjects, comparing freshmen and graduating students froma college of design, and adopts a
schematized data collection and analysis approach, Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA), to
ascertain the relationships between factors and establish a complete user mental model. The
study results present 11 primary affinity factors: “Pricing,” “Advertisement,” “User Interface,” “Innovation
Functions,” “System Maintenance,” “Privacy,” “Utility Functions,” “Personalization,” “Network
Performance,” “Customer Service,” and “Multimedia Contents.” The primary driver in evaluating
smartphones is found to be “Pricing” for graduating students and “Privacy” for freshmen.
The two groups share the same final effect factor, “Multimedia Contents.” This study has successfully
identified differences between the different mental models of the two groups, supporting the
method that using IQA to perform a quality evaluation of social networking for smartphones is effective.
Consequently, platform developers can understand user demand through a mental model
and can design good platform functions to effectively improve users’ experience of smartphones.