Cell Phone: Lisa Ji

After closely observing my cell phone usage for a few days, I noted a few particularly bothersome flaws:

1. Most of the time I keep the phone on silent because I’m in class, or around people I don’t want to bother with a loud ringtone. However, outside these times, I often forget (or it’s just annoying) to turn silent mode off, in which case I miss calls because I forgot the phone in the other room or something.
2. Although I don’t feel the need to go and assign everyone their own ringtone because that would require a lot of time and effort, I would like to know (by ringtone) whether the incoming call is a friend, a parent, from school or work related people, or someone I don’t know.

Along these lines, I would suggest the following design improvements:

1. If the phone display allows, adding some sort of easy-to-use interface that lets the user input their schedule in some way that the phone can understand would be really helpful. The user could then access the various time ‘blocks’ of their schedule, and create specific settings for each time period. For example, I could set the phone to be silent during class time, but on loud in between classes, when I’m walking around and it could be hard to hear my phone.
2. Although phones now allow users to give specific contacts certain ringtone settings, there’s no concept of groups or categories. If there were some way to create these distinctions, and give each group a certain ringtone/vibrate setting, a user could tell right away whether the incoming call is one they want to run across the apartment to pick up, or leave a meeting to check.

Among the design improvements I’ve suggested, there’s one notable social technical gap. Although creating a schedule in a phone is much like sending everyone a copy of your schedule and asking them to respect it and not bother you when you’re clearly busy, there are shortcomings. For example, what if someone needs to reach you for an emergency? In a social setting, someone could easily physically pull you out of a room/class/meeting, but with this sort of setting, if the user chooses to have the cell phone remain completely silent if people call during class, it would be very hard to reach them. To improve upon this, it would be an interesting experiment to give users an emergency extension. If someone has an emergency, hitting this extension during their call will cause the users phone to do whatever to alert them (presumably also a setting the user can specify). Of course, having this option is always a temptation to have it abused by over-enthusiastic news-givers.