Sophie Tech 4 – HELP!

 

It has been said that if you place multiple primates in a room with multiple typewriters, one will produce a novel.  In my case, though, only one primate was required to generate some interesting excitement.

 

Much like her father, Sophie exhibits an attraction to shiny things which blink, the LED status light on my Blackberry Pearl being one of the best examples.  I don’t know if she is enthralled by the fact that the light blinks, or that it blinks in different colors, but it speaks to her in a voice that whispers, “Push buttons.”  It does communicate to her, though differently than it does to me.  I see the red that notifies me of new e-mail, the blue that lets me know I’m attached via Bluetooth, the green that tells me when I’m in a preferred network and the amber which tells me I’ve surfed too long without recharging; she sees the blinking. 

 

To both of us, the device communicates a possible need for action, which is a great advance over having to click on icons to check status, find out if there is new mail, etc.  A great design that communicates rudimentary information to the user without user interaction being necessary to obtain it, and best of all, it uses a visual communication language that is recognizable across a broad spectrum of the population.

 

One of the other things that she has done has been to actually open up applications using the roller ball interface.  Even at her age, she has associated the action of rolling the ball with moving a cursor to another icon, and the action of pressing the roller with causing the screen to change into something else.  Once that application is open, she can even make letters appear by hitting the buttons she sees there.  That seems like a pedestrian feat, but in what is really a small amount of time, we have come from devices that require us to modify how we do things to devices that we customize to do things our way.  The example that springs to mind is the old Palm Pilot. 

 

I’m not sure if all the readers of this blog will have first-hand knowledge of this, but there was a time when the ability to enter information into a handheld organizer required the learning of a new language called Graffiti.  Graffiti was based on the English alphabet, but the shapes of the letters you had to learn and use with the Palm equipment were in some cases confusing, and the entire process was definitely one which tool some practice.  Whether your device uses a full QWERTY keyboard, or a stacked keyboard such as is used on the Pearl (as a side note, you can set it up to learn your vocabulary, and after a while of learning the device can guess the word you’re trying to type in, making the process a lot better), input and usability are vastly-enhanced over even 5 years ago.  Sophie will most likely be guided toward learning and using L33Tspeak (ROFL, etc.) by peer pressure, but will not have to learn a different way of writing just to enter appointments into a device.  The concept will be extremely foreign and well-removed from her world.

 

Though there are many observations on the usability of my particular mobile device, time and the reader’s attention demand a brief summary.  Thus, the reason for this post emerges.  I remember a time when one of the most popular giveaways to customers was a vinyl phonebook cover, upon which were listed the phone numbers of the fire department, police department, hospital, and other, similar organizations.  One reason for that listing was that, should a need arise, one would need to have that information handy.  9-1-1 service was being developed and deployed, but it certainly had not been as widely-applied as it is today, and so the need to make a decision on whom to call was placed onto the individuals undergoing a stressful situation. 

 

Today we don’t even need to remember where we are, the caller ID and location technologies do that for us, and the 9-1-1 operator makes the decisions on who and what manner of help to send.  Sophie found this to be true even of cell phones, because a couple Saturday’s ago, I was watching her when my phone rang.  She had called 9-1-1 service and then hung up, so they were checking to see if there truly was an emergency.  After the embarrassment wore off, the concept hit me that what has been done with that technology is truly remarkable.  None of my children will ever have to worry about what to dial in the event of an emergency, at least in the States.  They won’t have to try to evaluate the physical signs to try to determine their location or the prevailing issues, because they will be aided by a technology that takes care of that for them.

 

The technologies we’re working with clearly have the ability to be helpful and efficient, and they are also apparently very usable.  The overall point of my observation is that we have done a great job in designing usability into our communications devices, and usefulness has also been fairly well-done, but that the entire experience is on a continuum, and we constantly need to evaluate where we are on any given project.  If emergency service required seven digits, then the number of accidental calls by the Sophie’s of the world would be a lot lower, but then again, the reason it was made to be three digits was that that was as many as some situations would allow, so the decision was made to deal with a lot of false alarms to ensure that the true emergencies were handled properly.  There was also a time when you could get on the POTS, dial only five digits and reach someone who shared your exchange, but today you have to dial the full seven (or with the proliferation of cell numbers from other areas, all 10), which is less convenient for those making only local calls, exchanging usability for efficiency and better equipment.  As we carry designs forward, we need to make sure that the systems are so intuitive that the average least-experienced users of those systems are served, while eliminating the ability to shoot oneself in the foot. 

 

The reason for the last statement is the way that Sophie had to have dialed the number (I have surmised this, because of the negative potential for finding out I’m right during an actual test).  She didn’t dial in 9-1-1, she just pressed on the trackball while the phone was locked.  It asked her if she wanted to make an emergency call, and she clicked as such.  At that moment, usefulness gave way to annoyance, for as many times as we’ve all leaned against something with our cell phone in its holster and accidentally made a phone call, how much more annoying would it be to have that happen with fire trucks showing up?