A long-time friend of mine works at a major defense contractor, and is regularly providing me an interesting background in corporate telecoms. Most relevantly, his departent (company?) went wireline replacement some years back, so he’s issued a smartphone. They’ve had well-publicized lost computers full of employee data, so exercise a lot of control over their devices.
Here’s an email I got from him recently:
My Blackberry pisses me off in how it manages meeting notices.If I don’t use my phone for a while, I might have several meeting reminders waiting for me when I go to use the phone. So when I pick up the phone, the first thing I have to do is unlock it by typing in a fairly complicated password. Then I’m immediately smacked with these meeting / task reminders.
99.9% of the time, I sitting in front of my laptop and I manage meetings/reminders on my desktop and not via the phone. But if even if I dismiss meeting reminders on my desktop, those meetings aren’t dismissed on the phone. Similarly, if I dismiss things on the phone, they’re not dismissed on my desktop.
So I hate the phone reminders. But that’s not even the biggest problem. The bigger usability problem is when I need to pick up and use my phone quickly. One example is when I’m receiving a call. And the other is when I need to make a call quickly.
When I want to recieve a call, I can pick up the phone and just press a button to answer without having to unlock the phone with a password. Typically I take all calls on speakerphone, though, so my desire is to press a button to answer the phone and then press the two button combo to put the phone on speaker. The problem, though, is that as soon as I answer the phone, I am FORCED to disposition each meeting reminder before the keyboard will allow me to switch to speaker phone. I MUST address each notice before I can go to speaker phone. Pisses me off.
And when I want to make a call quickly, the same problem occurs. I pick up the phone, unlock it with the password, and start dialing the number I want to call, only to realize that the phone isn’t even recognizing my typing because it wants me to first disposition the meeting notices. There is no way for me to make a call before I deal with each of the meeting reminders. Which is best exemplified by another common (and irksome scenario). ..
I’m on a conference call from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. And I know that at 11:00 a.m. I need to go RIGHT into another call. So at 11:00 I hang up from the call I was on and immediately start dialing the next number I urgently need to get to, only to be again forced to deal with meeting reminders BEFORE I can make the call. I’m simply forbidden to dial until I give my calendar the attention it desires. If I end up being late for my 11:00 meeting, too bad.
Since when is my calendar more important than me being able to use the phone? Why can’t the meeting reminders wait?
I’ve had much the same opinion about some things my mobiles do, but haven’t had time to think much lately, so haven’t typed them up. But there are several lessons here.
First, end users matter. Some of his issues are a result of security software loaded by the corporate entity. Some of the others might even be surmountable by customizing the device. But it’s highly locked to him. He cannot do almost anything to his phone.
I did a fair amount of B2B (and government) work while at Sprint, and saw this a lot. Ignoring end users because they don’t make decisions. Yes, my friend cannot drop his service or change handsets, but his productivity is clearly impacted by poor user experience.
Second, you have to design holistically, or maybe, systematically. The Palm Pre I am using now is good at obscuring keyboard functions (including the mute and speakerphone functions, like my friend’s case).
My friend’s problem seems to be that every alert is modal. For the project I am currently working on, I almost let that happen by accident just by semantics. I called this subtle notification strip “alerts” in the documentation. By default the developers assumed that word meant they were critical and therefore modal. Luckily I (and the rest of the Little Springs team) was around and evaluating what SAs and developers were doing, and noticed this.
I have some detailed strategies aside from “constantly review” to correct this, but no magic bullet. Essentially, I say you need someone with a product-level vision, and I like to say that’s a dedicated designer.
For that product with the notification strip, it was blocked off for each and every screen and state wireframed out. Only a few things can be obscured by it, and those are carefully chosen; it’s okay if they are unavailable for a moment. This is my sort of tactic for holistic design, and so far seems to be working out.
Third, and maybe most importantly, people matter more than devices. I get similar behavior with my calendar reminders. I can get the same reminder:
- In google calendar as a popup
- In gmail
- Sent as an email to the corporate email
- Popping up on the phone
That’s not even considering that I have 2-3 computers I might be on, all with access to the same network of services. I could theoretically dismiss the same reminder TEN TIMES.
Sure, sure. I want it to be able to come up on all these, so I don’t forget about a meeting. I am forgetful, so need the help.
But I have to wonder why it cannot send a message to the network when you dismiss or snooze an alarm. Then dismisses (or snoozes) the alert in ALL your locations.
If I dismiss, that means I saw it, and should not have to be reminded again and again. I. Me. The person. Who cares about the the system?