The effects of device technology on the usability of advanced telephone functions

TLDR

The study investigates how different device technologies affect the usability of advanced telephone functions. The authors prototyped three telephone systems—standard 12‑button, 12‑button with speech synthesis, and a display‑with‑pointing device—each offering call routing, call screening, and message retrieval. Results indicated that the display‑based phone was fastest and most preferred, while the voice‑prompting interface was slowest and least liked, highlighting the need for prompting interfaces to improve control and efficiency without increasing learning or forgetting.

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study that addresses the effect that device technology has on the usability of advanced telephone functions. We prototyped telephone systems using three technologies: the current 12-button phone set, the current phone set augmented with speech synthesis, and a phone set augmented with a display and pointing device. The functions that we offered included call routing, call screening, and message retrieval. Experiments showed that a display-based phone was the fastest to use and was preferred; an interface that used voice-prompting was the slowest and least liked. This points out that future work on prompting interfaces will have to address user control and efficiency issues without causing learning/forgetting problems.