I *hate* this bloody phone system

[jducoeur]

Case study of bad design: I just got a phone message at work. To deal with it, I have to:

Press the VoiceMail button.
Enter my phone extension (the one I'm holding in my hand, mind), followed by "#"
Enter my password, followed by "#". Note that this has to be done slowly -- if you enter it too fast, it drops digits and rejects the login attempt.
Press 2 to receive messages
Listen to the very... slowly... spoken... message... intro, which consists of the phone number that called, the time of the call, and the length of the call. *Then* I get offered another menu, and pass 0 to listen.
After the message is done, press *d (note the sudden switch from numerics to letter codes) to delete it.

All told, it takes 1-2 minutes to listen to a 15-second phone message, and the interface is so incoherent I can't remember the menu commands. If I ever write a UI quite this bad, someone please shoot me...

Comments

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Audix. I hate it, too, especially the prompts that treat every user like a 3 year old.

Bring me back to Phone Mail (Rolm) when I was at IBM.

[laurion]

You are making me very grateful for our new VOIP Unity system, where all the voicemails are recorded as wave files, letting us do fun thiings like e-mail voicemail messages to ourselves or others, or press a button on the phone to speed up or slow down the playback speed (great for getting those phone numbers that go by too fast). Voicemail systems seem to be like thermostats; new ones have great bells and whistles, but no one will replace them until they stop working or it become more cost effective to do so.

[jducoeur]

Except that this *is* a newfangled VOIP-based system, with bells and whistles and such. That's no impediment to bad UI design; indeed, part of why the UI is so dreadful is that the basic functions like voicemail are obscured under the cruft.

I just finished a very nice survey in the Economist (from months ago), whose main thrust was that business is finally waking up to the fact that computer tech has to start getting a *lot* simpler to use. (They point out that every technological revolution starts out being a preposterous pain in the ass, then spends decades getting the usability right.) A few gadgets get it right now (eg, the iPod), but the rest of it can't come too soon, IMO...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

We have an ancient Norstar system, which like most phone systems, has a bad enough user interface that I've never done things like programming speed-dial buttons. But it has two unusually annoying features:

- If you have a message, it will display a prompt for dialing voice mail using one of the menu buttons below the display, but if you pick up the reciever, the prompt disappears and the buttons lose that function, so you must dial through to voice mail on speakerphone. (Fortunately, you can pick up the receiver before actually playing the messages.)

- The prompt for messages is text displayed on an un-backlit LCD display. No message light, no blinking. (Even cheap hotel phone systems have that.) In the winter late in the day, I have to remember to use a flashlight to check if I have messages, because it's unreadable with just the fluorescent light on the other side of the desk.