Redesigning Mobile Phone Contact List to Integrate African Social Practices

Abstract

During the last decade, the design of social software involving the mobile phone contact list has been an active field of research. Systems, mostly those based on awareness, addressed many issues of social interest such as group communication or social ties building and strengthening. Yet, the mobile devices contact lists, as they are designed until now, do not efficiently take into account the social connections. Besides, the social connections are the principal provider of contact entries. Moreover, the current contact lists do not allow to efficiently retrieve/remember a contact who is forgotten or concerned by homonymy. Focusing on African social practices and behaviors, this paper proposed to redesign the contact list by integrating social relations that link people. This redesigning is accompanied with novel functionalities that will facilitate contacts retrieval, homonymy resolving and contacts remembering.