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From: morris@jade.jpl.nasa.gov (Mike Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Phone Design For Humans
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Date: 28 Sep 89 06:26:19 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 415, message 1 of 5

(Andy Meijers) writes:
>
>A minor plea to those who design 'modern' telephone sets, esp. for
>offices.

>1. Make them HEAVIER, and put a nonskid base on them. As I write this,
>I have just pulled my ATT-issue (came with System 8.5) sculpture off
>the desk for the umpteenth time. Guess I'll end up taping it to the
>desk, like many do around here.

I took an old steam iron plate, contact cemented a rubber pad to it and
then cemented the plate to the phone.  Ugly, but it works.  When people
comment about it, I say "Only way I could make the new phone as usable
as the old one".

>2. Shape the handsets to FIT THE HUMAN HEAD! Real people do not talk
>daintily holding the handset in their fingertips. They jam it on one
>shoulder so they write. This worthless thing promptly shoots out of
>sight if you try.

A friend acquired a spare handset and gutted it, and moved the guts
into a old style handset.  Modular cords, etc...  There's also a
pad sold by some phone stores that works real good...  It mounts
with a peel-and-stick adhesive...

>3. Don't position the cord connectors so the handset cord tangles unto
>itself 2 inches from the base. (see # 1, above). Put the line cord

There's a gadget sold in some phone stores, and in the Hello Direct
catalog that fixes that - it's a swivel device.

>where the it won't cause the phone to trip over it whenever you move
>it six inches.

Huh?

>4. Put a button for each function! (ie, hold, transfer etc). Phones
>should not require constant referral to the manual to operate; they
>should be self-evident. While you're at it, make the buttons REAL,
>with a click.  A pox on squishy membrane switches and finger-nail-tip
>size buttons a quarter inch apart.

Hello the designers - are you listening?  I don't mind a [SHIFT] key,
if the shifted functions are the lesser used ones, as long as I can
say which are the lesser used!  i.e. Give us a user definable keyboard,
with an overlay that can be labeled with a pencil/pen and slides into the
phone behind a clear overlay.

>5. Make cords that don't lose their coil in a month, or that act like
>a DNA molecule and coil back on themselves, with a non-porous surface
>that doesn't get filthy immediately . (That also applies to the whole
>phone. Make it cleanable!)

Yes Yes Yes

>6. Make a ringer/bell that can be tracked by ear. In an office full of
>chirping crickets, all with the speakers buried, it is often hard to
>tell which one is ringing.

Here's one place where I wish the rest of the world had copied Rolm -
their phones had 4 different ring sounds, user selectable.  On the old
500 phones you could swap gongs around (the normal phone had one high and
one low, by swapping gongs in two of 3 phones you could have one normal,
one high, one low).  Some EKS phones can have a capacitor changed.  But
a selectable ring tone would take only a few bytes in a microprocessor
based phone, why can't we have such an obvious thing?

>I could go on for another page, but you get the idea. Fancy sculptures
>may sell well in the catalog or showroom, but are often miserable for
>the users. (This translates to Lo$t productivity.)

It's obvious - the designers have secretaries!

>Buyers: Get a thirty-day 'test-drive' clause.
>
>Designers: (including ATT, WECO, etc): Go back and look at the 500 and
>2500 series desk sets again. There is a reason they lasted so long,
>and were so widely imitated. They WORKED!!!

An old saying comes to mind: Intelligence is not company policy.

Mike Morris                      UUCP: Morris@Jade.JPL.NASA.gov
                                 ICBM: 34.12 N, 118.02 W
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