When design is not about problem solving

I just finished a user-centered design course with an unusual group project: redesign the office phone. It seemed easy.  Everyone thinks office phones are dumb and ugly, right?  After all, no one knows how to use features like conference call and transfer.  The phone's functionality is like a fossil record: layers of new buttons alongside old buttons, all bolted together uneasily onto a chunk of gray plastic.

Although the class was about applying user-centered methodology, the users we interviewed were resigned to the current phone.  As a result, our first prototype fulfilled the UCD requirements, but it was just as dull as the current product. So our professor pushed us to come up with something more creative than the incremental changes suggested by user research. 

The process reminded me of a rant about design I read recently.  I'd always felt comfortable with the definition of design being "solving problems."  Sometimes, though, the only real issue is an aesthetic problem, and the only user feedback is apathy. So what? You can still take a new product to market and surprise and delight customers with great design.

My team's final prototype was a round, glowing disk called the Orange Moon phone.  I think it turned out well, though it's not likely to get picked up by Nortel anytime soon. The corporate IT departments that buy these phones are not known for brave design choices.  Perhaps your next office phone will be beige instead of gray -- that's progress for you.

For some data about trends in tech devices, all five project groups in class incorporated these technologies:

• Biometrics
• Bluetooth headsets
• Touchscreens

And one or more added these:

• Handwriting recognition
• Videoconferencing
• Wearable computing

Comments

[Andrew Wirtanen]

That's a good class project. At my company, we're a design consultancy, but we didn't really get to choose our phones. I believe management had a few options and they picked one of the cheaper ones. For everything other than calling, it's bad. Erasing a voicemail message takes at least 5 key presses (if you know where you're going).

Your prototype looks great. I would love being able to visualize "linked" and on hold calls. It does look like you are a missing a mute button and a speakerphone button though.

[jen]

great post, i really like your redesigned interface. i think the roundness is nicely reminiscent of an old rotary phone - a more lovely, if less functional, object than any push-button device!

i think yr comments re: aesthetics are interesting as well. i've been doing a lot of design work for print lately, and in that world it is taken for granted that your end product will be beautiful as well as functional. admittedly there are fewer usability concerns for a printed piece, as you can safely assume that people know how to open a folder or turn a page. still, all interaction designers can take a page out of apple's book and recognize that an interface that is functional, usable, and gorgeous will really get users excited.

[Sean]

Nice design. But which button do I push to put the caller on hold?

[Josh]

We tried to make hold automatic. If you have two people on the line, and you switch to one, the other goes to hold without you having to push anything. If you're on the line with one person and you call someone else, the first person hold automatically when you hit Call.

This is a hold-over feature we tried to do away with. It's always a stepping stone to something else, so why not have people go directly to that next step? I'm not totally sure we made it clear tho.