My Dad's Cell Phone (I'm Back!)

Wow, I really haven't posted here in a while. Vast apologies to you, dear imaginary readers! It's been a hectic couple weeks for me: I got a job, scheduled a spur-of-the-moment trip back to St. Louis to visit my folks before the job started, then came back to Chicago and immediately started working and apartment hunting. Most of that has quieted down now -- I'm back in town and settling in at the new gig, although I am still looking for a new place -- so hopefully I'll be back to frequent updates soon. Anyway, on to the content!

While I was at home, I was trying to help my dad turn his Sony Ericsson flip phone (a pretty badly designed phone, which he hates passionately) on vibrate. The first thing I tried, because it's how I'd do it on my Motorola L2, is clicking the volume down button on the left hand side of the phone. Well, that brought up a "phone status" window. Awesome. We eventually found the setting buried in, I kid you not, like a fourth-level menu. Now, there was a button (I think it was pound sign) that had a little musical note above it, and I bet that mght have helped us out... if we could've figured out how to activate it.

This phone was also the subject of a humorous debate a bit back, between myself and an extremely intelligent friend of mine who has a master's degree in computer science. I was looking at his Ericsson, which, like my dad's, has a button labeled "C" on it, and I said I suspected labeling a button "C" was bad interface design. He responded that "C" obviously stood for cancel, and no further explanation was needed. About a month later, my dad complained to me that the phone tried to delete his contacts when he hit the "Call" button...! Just for fun, try to think of some phone-related verbs that start with the letter C. Off the top of my head, I've got: cancel, call, clear, complete, close.

Anyway, the purpose of that anecdote isn't to denigrate comp scis, just to show how a designer has to think differently than most people, and even differently than very smart people. However, if a comp sci and an HCI grad fought a katana deathmatch inside the rusted shell of an abandoned nuclear submarine, my money's on the HCI grad.