Assignment 6

One of the things I find most bothersome, from my long list of annoyances with my new phone, is trying to shut my phone off quietly. You figure, "I am walking into a meeting, better shut off my phone as not to disturb." You try to power it off and it literally goes into an uproarious song and dance. It is the loudest few second long promo song I every heard, no matter the volume setting on the phone. It also vibrates. I find myself just removing the battery when I feel the need to power down the phone. Another annoying feature is trying to get pictures or songs to be saved on the micro card. To have a seamless transfer from phone to computer or vise versa is almost impossible. I still have not been able to use songs from my iTunes library on this phone. I must get some converter. Convert the songs from Mac iTunes format to whatever obscure format my phone uses and get them back on the phone. Or repurchase them via my phone service. Who wants to go through that additional expense or extra work? Trying to download pictures is another hassle. I take out the micro card from the phone (located under the battery) put it into a larger card converter thus enabling me to use it in a card reader. I then download my Jpegs to the card. Great! Now disconnect everything remove the battery in order to put the Micro card back into the phone and Villa! "Picture format not recognized by this phone." What a hassle!

“People not only adapt to their systems, they adapt their systems to their needs” (Ackerman, 183). Part of the problem with this ideology is that most phone designs are not as intuitive as the developers and designers think they are. Plus each manufacture makes there design different. You usually change your phone every two years with your phone plain or upgrade so you are constantly trying to learn a new interface.

Yes my ideal phone sounds much like an iPhone. This design is more of a universal menu design for about half the market that want iPhone features and ease of use, but does not want to pay the price for that unit? Nor do they want to change their phone planes? Nor do they want to purchase additional equipment. I would like to design a phone that would make it easier to download any format of music file. The phone OS would recognize pictures if you sent them directly to your phone or remove the card and download the information using a card reader for better photo quality. Lastly, a phone OS that would not by pass your settings to increase volume levels when performing commands or administrative features simply to advertise the unit as some “hip” or “modern” invention.

Ackerman states that most of the early collaborative systems were awkward. That without studies that look into the issues of how humans manipulated the design (Human Computer Intervention studies), much of our later designs would not be as flexible or have the ability to have a more sophisticated user intuitive design behind it. I feel that with more HCI we would be able to develop a more “intelligent” devices with the ability to make better environments where systems would work more for the user instead of the user changing for every device environment that they own.