Assignment 6: Joyce Lee (jl579)

Despite having a camera/MP3 phone, I noticed, after a few days observation, that I do not use its functions past that of a basic phone, such as calling and texting. Even then, however, based on the way the phone is built, I still have problems with just that basic usage.

For one, I use my phone as an alarm clock in the morning, and so, I cannot set its sound off overnight. However, when I wake up in the morning, I do not always remember to set it on silent, and during the day, I have had it happen where the phone rang in the middle of the lecture, much to my embarrassment. This is a simple problem, and could be solved if I were just a bit more conscientious with my turning-off-and-on, but guessing from the number of times that a phone goes off in class, I am guessing this is still a problem not unique to me. A way to solve this would be to program into phones an option to input your weekly schedule. Based on this schedule, and periods of time you mark as "busy", either when you're in class or at work, the phone will automatically set itself to silent. Similarly, the alarm clock will also go off at a preset time every day. Should it happen that you have a different schedule every day, the program will accommodate for that. As it stands now, my phone only has 3 options of 'scheduling' for alarms: either it goes off every day, Mondays - Fridays, or one time only.

Secondly, my phone is a touch-screen phone, and when I flip it on to its horizontal side, a full QWERTY keyboard shows up for typing texts. This is convenient, but at the same time, I find myself making a lot of mistakes because of the small screen. All the keys are very close together, and the pads of my fingers can sometimes cover two or three keys at once if I am not careful, which explains the errors. It's impossible to solve this by making the keyboard bigger - the phone's physical size is a limitation I'd like to keep, since I like that it's small - but a program could be installed to sense obvious errors in spelling and auto-correct them, much like in a word-processor. Many of my mistakes are glaringly obvious, and a spell-checker would definitely improve my correctness rate.

Socio-technical gaps exist in either of the proposed solutions to the two problems. In the first example, there is the fact to consider that people do not always strictly follow the schedule every day. Even for those days with a set class, sometimes I may miss a class because I'm out of town, and forget to turn the pre-programmed schedule off, in an ironic flip of the situation. Or, during weeks off, your schedule completely changes. In practice, there is a discrepancy between what people say they do (programming in your schedule) and what they actually do (sleeping in, skipping class, etc.) In the second example, users would encounter the same problem that we have when using spellcheck. What if I want to misspell a word? It'd be harder on a phone to just "right click" and ignore the auto-correct. The system is not designed to handle purposeful errors like these. The phone's functional designers would have to consider both these possibilities when creating such additional features, perhaps by allowing ease of re-programming in the first case, or a way for the user to easily 'undo' the auto-correct, with a simple 'ignore' button somewhere on the interface.