The desktop phone experience

Some user journeys are so uncompromisingly bad that I never even dare begin. But it’s not always online where these woeful experiences are to be had. The one experience that is almost guaranteed to induce temple-vein syndrome is the one that starts with a cursory glance at my desktop phone.

On my desk is a large black plastic device that has a bewildering array of buttons, labelled things like ‘prog’, and ‘auto-ans’ or even ‘flash/recall’. I’m not entirely sure what all those buttons might do, or why they need to be different shapes and sizes. Maybe there’s some kind of logical relationship implied there. If there is, I’m struggling to see it.

As if to illustrate the inadequacies of the desktop phone user experience, we just required an impromptu training session in the office, just to complete a simple phone programming task. I say training session, but what it really amounted to was Chris shouting instructions to us from the corner and us pressing seemingly random buttons and picking up and putting down the handset multiple times. I have no idea what steps were taken and I’ll never remember, but I can now dial the London office with a ‘number 2’.

I would never have attempted that myself. I only need to look at the phone to know it’s a journey I don’t want to take. Surely this experience should be better. Maybe we could start with:

• Simplification
  I’ll never use half the features on my phone, perhaps they shouldn’t be there in the first place
• Organisation
• Just organising the interface elements better might suggest how they are related
• On-screen help
  There is a screen; it might only be a single line of text, but it doesn’t currently provide any help during an interaction, just a mocking blankness

If you’ve got any suggestions, give me a call.

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