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From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: ap, Windows BASIC
Message-ID: <PLi6424w164w@mantis.co.uk>
Date: 26 Jun 91 13:42:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: mantis.PLi6424w164w
References: <ENAG.91Jun25165651@gyda.ifi.uio.no>
Followup-To: comp.human-factors
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
Lines: 46

enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:
> Can you imagine a telephone which is so easy to use that you don't
> need any time learning how to use it?  [...]
>               Now think of all the incredible losers in the world who
> could actually _need_ a menu-based phone.

You certainly picked a bad example there.

Telephones are *incredibly* badly designed; everything from the upside-down
keypad to the stupid numeric "star 2 6 hash" commands.

There are week-long training courses for secretaries to teach them to use
their telephones, because the telephones are so appallingly badly designed.
Most businessmen have no idea how to use their telephones for even a quarter
of the things they can be used for.

I used to use a telephone with features like forward call, redial, multiple
lines, and so on; it had oodles of those little dinky calculator-style
buttons all over it, and loads of multi-coloured LEDs.  It was like Wesley's
control panel in Star Trek.

In order to make it useful, there was a one-page "Quick Reference Card",
listing all the stupid numeric codes you were supposed to remember in order
to do everyday things like tranferring calls.

I sat and looked at the card, doodled on some paper for a bit, and worked out
that you could encode just about every function supported by this telephone
into about ten or twenty buttons.  The buttons would have words on them, and
you'd indicate what you wanted to do by pushing buttons to make a sentence. 
The buttons would be arranged in columns going from left to right, so you'd
pick no more than one from each column.

Of course, it would be trickier to decode internally.  So we have telephones
with "[*] [5] [6] [#] [2] [3]" instead of "[Transfer call] [to] [2] [3]",
because it's easier for the hardware people to handle.  And we have telephones
with one button for each combination of operations, rather than a smaller set
of buttons which you can push more than one of.

It was almost enough to make me want to buy a Mac just so that I could use
Hypercard to design a proper telephone front-end and have the Mac beep the
correct tones into my bozo-phone.


mathew