responses for day one

User-centred design is important because, when done properly, it can eliminate a lot of frustration for the user. If a customer is unsatisfied with a product's usability, for example a cell phone or PDA, s/he will probably tell his/her friends not to purchase the product because it is inefficient or annoying to use.

Last year, I had this crummy data entry job and the company had designed its own information processing system. As we were discussing yesterday in class, the designers/creators of the system were not the users - they didn't know how to do the job the system was designed for and therefore couldn't anticipate some of the problems that showed up after implementation.

We (i.e. the users) were encouraged to send "heat tickets" to the IT department when we encountered something that was inefficient or problematic with the system. This was nice in theory, but the IT people were busy people and couldn't cater to all of our desires to improve the system so that we could be more efficient at our job. The complaints were prioritized based on the severity of the slow-down - if it was detrimental to completing one's job it was considered urgent and addressed immediately, but if it was simply "annoying" and could be avoided through what they called "short cuts" then the written request gathered dust at the bottom of the pile. According to office legend, some complaints had stayed there, untouched, since the system release date, nearly seven years prior.

Once the system was in place there wasn't enough time or money to invest in something that my colleagues and I found irritating and disruptive because the IT department didn't deem it necessary to job completion.

Of course there are testers in the IT department who did test runs to make sure the system ran without glitches, but in this case, it would have been helpful if there was more user-testing conducted before the new system was released. The problems that arose after implementation would have been discovered sooner, therefore preventing many a headache for both users and designers.

Moving along...

On a very basic level, the numbers on a cell phone's keypad are interactive: I push a button which records a phone number and when I press "send" it connects me to that number.

The camera option is also interactive because I can capture an image by pressing a button. The same is true of the video component. If a cell phone has an mp3 player, the buttons that control this feature can also be considered interactive since pressing them produces sound.

My phone has a "Say a Command" feature that responds to my voice. So if I tell it to "Call Home" it will bring up a list of my contacts that (apparently) have "home" in them. I have to admit I don't this often because I find it annoying and also strange to tell my phone to do things that my fingers can do just as easily. It also seems pretty primitive in design, since when I say "Call Home" the options that appear are: "Catherine," "Matt," and "Kara," none of which are my home, nor have the word "home" in their contact entries. My actual home number, entered as "Home" in my contacts, is not an option. Annoying it may be, but also undeniably interactive.

There is lots of interactivity in the cell phone and I've never really thought about in this light!