I found some particularly interesting data when looking through my cell phone’s history log. When I look at “recent calls,” it shows some arbitrary number of my most recent calls, somewhere on the order of 20. It shows all incoming calls (missed and answered) and all outgoing calls. Each entry is time stamped and below are the dates from my log:
2/20 (Friday)
2/22 (Sunday)
2/25 (Wednesday)
2/26 (x3) (Thursday)
2/27 (x2) (Friday)
2/28 (x7) (Saturday)
3/01 (x12) (Sunday)
Without context, the data seems random. It is apparent that the day of the week doesn’t really matter as one weekend contained 2 calls while the next had 21. The reason the numbers spiked is because I went on a trip this past weekend to Boston. For the most part, I organized a 9 person, 2 car, trip to Boston to watch a track meet. We left on Saturday morning and came back on Sunday. When trying to locate and assemble nine people, it seems most effective to call people instead of texting them. For example, I made several calls Saturday morning to let people know to come outside so that we could pick them up. Regarding coordination and assembly, it is much easier to call someone.
While at the meet however, phone calls were terribly inconvenient. The meet was at an indoor track and there was lots of ambient noise and cheering. It was almost impossible to hear any phone conversation, let alone your phone ring. It was much more convenient to communicate via text while inside the building. The messages were decidedly less urgent as well.
A “Smart Phone” could have the ability to alert your status to others. By that, I mean it could broadcast a simple statement saying if you were “Busy” or “Available” or perhaps you could set a custom message. People would then know if it would be best to call you or to send you a text. Another feature it could have is some kind of noise canceling around the speaker of the phone so that you could easily hear the speaker. Twice during the meet I found myself saying, “I can’t really hear you, I’ll call you back later,” and hanging up without hearing any response.
One social technical gap that comes to mind is that people might not know that it’s a bad time to talk if it doesn’t sound like you’re in a crowded room (assume the noise canceling worked for the mic too). If you’re in a loud room, you’re probably distracted and the phone conversation might be at the back of your mind making you seem distant. One way to counter it could just be the status message to they know ahead of time that you might be busy.
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I also thought that a “status alert” system would be a useful technology in my smart phone. The biggest problem I could see, though, would be people simply ignoring the system in favor of their own agenda. You can see this with AIM chat all the time. At least for me, I will still get a lot of messages when I am set to away because the away message is so ambiguous. People prefer ambiguity sometimes, but this leaves a great deal of information to the interpretation of others.
ReplyDeletei love this idea. I was going to talk about it my post, but that would have put me close to 700 words. AIM has used this principle for a very long time now, the idea that people aren't always near their computer, or they are not available to talk at the time. With AIM, it's difficult to determine whether someone is in front of their computer unless you integrate the webcam into the program. The phone could have a similar input like AIM where the user can change their status. But to make it more autonomous, the phone could have a proximity sensor and detect whether the user is near the cell phone. It could also integrate the calendar/schedule application that comes with most phones to automatically set the phone to "away."
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