The effects of device technology on the usability of advanced telephone functions

  • Authors:
  • T. L. Roberts;G. Engelbeck

  • Affiliations:
  • U S West Advanced Technologies, Englewood, CO;U S West Advanced Technologies, Englewood, CO

  • Venue:
  • CHI '89 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study that addresses the effect that device technology has on the usability of advanced telephone functions. We prototyped telephone systems using three technologies: the current 12-button phone set, the current phone set augmented with speech synthesis, and a phone set augmented with a display and pointing device. The functions that we offered included call routing, call screening, and message retrieval. Experiments showed that a display-based phone was the fastest to use and was preferred; an interface that used voice-prompting was the slowest and least liked. This points out that future work on prompting interfaces will have to address user control and efficiency issues without causing learning/forgetting problems.