Over the past two days of cell phone use, I have discovered two things about my cell phone. Vibrate is a great feature, but it needs to be managed correctly. Second, people call at the worst times, and inevitably interrupt what you are doing, and usually it is for something unimportant. Ignoring a call is risky, and knowing which call to ignore or which one was an emergency would be helpful. Fortunately, I have an unreasonable and unfeasible solution to these questions (some of the ideas might work).
First, the vibrate feature. My phone is always on vibrate. Why? Because I don’t want to disturb anyone with its ringing, especially in class, and I am able to tell when my phone rings. True, but it doesn’t always work. For example, if I go to the kitchen for a moment, and I leave my phone on the desk, I’m probably not going to hear it vibrate, but it’s a lot of work to switch it to ring. It would be a cool feature to have the phone automatically switch to vibrate when it detects a certain level of body heat (or maybe biometrics), and when those biometrics are out of range, the phone will switch to ring. This sounds great in theory, but sometimes we don’t want the phone to ring even when we are not near it. For example, if you leave your phone in your bag during a test, it will switch to ring, even if you wanted it on vibrate.
Second, no matter what I am doing, I receive a phone interruption. That’s life. If it’s my parents, I always take the call, but it would be nice to know if mom is checking to see if I got the sweater she sent me, or if she needs some immediate assistance. Usually, it’s the former, and I hate leaving class to talk about a sweater. I suggest some sort of call screening by priority, in which the caller can use *** in order to denote an important call by dialing that at the end of the number. Obviously, this lends itself to certain abuses (people may pretend things are important, or people aren’t sure that their thing is important enough to bother someone with).
The social-technical gaps for these are actually pretty minimal and easy to overcome. It does take some user effort to override the phone’s biometric options on occasion, but that is unavoidable. In the second choice, the it is possible that users will overuse or underuse this feature, and during a real emergency, they might forget about it entirely, causing me to ignore the call, a clear social-technical gap. On the whole, this would be a much better phone.
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The vibrate feature was the first thing I blogged about too. I didn't think of biometrics though, what an interesting idea. If that kind of technology actually arises and becomes popular, I could think of many other things it would be useful for. Besides helping close the social technical gap of the vibrate feature, of could also help with security, and maybe it could even know when we're sleeping or exercising and instruct our phones to react accordingly. I mentioned on someone else's entry that there seems to be a pretty tough tradeoff between being able to have very detailed settings and ease of editing these settings, but I think your idea might hold a lot of potential in this area.
ReplyDeleteI really like your idea about the priority screening. Although this has the potential to be abused, like you said, I think this could be avoided by negotiating a code. For example, you might be working on a group project, so people in your group could press '3' and you'd know it had to do with the group.
ReplyDeleteI also almost always have my phone on vibrate, and I would definitely appreciate having some type of proximity sensor or long-range bluetooth to ensure I don't miss calls.