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At my last job they replaced the POTS telephone system that had been around for 30 years with a new POE touchscreen phone. The backlight never dimmed and it occ
by Declanomous 8y ago
At my last job they replaced the POTS telephone system that had been around for 30 years with a new POE touchscreen phone. The backlight never dimmed and it occasionally showed an animation.
I wrote an angry ticket about it after about 2 days of having it, and 3 people from the IT department and 2 people from the company that sold us the phones showed up at my desk the next day, trying to figure out if there was something wrong with my phone, because "it shouldn't be that distracting."
The only person who understood why I was pissed was the mid-level tech support guy from the phone company.
I hated that phone so much I covered it in a sheet and only uncovered it if it was ringing.
Similarly, the ringtones were all super obnoxious. When everyone had the same ring you could just tune out the ones that weren't coming from right beside you. The new phones had a huge speaker on the back and the ringtones demanded attention like a klaxon. It was maddening because the phone of someone 3 cubes behind you could get a call and it would be louder for you than it would be for them.
Also, the touchscreen took 3 times longer to use than the old design did just because buttons are faster, you can use them without looking, and the UI was slow to begin with.
I love using new technology, and I wanted a new phone because the old one was huge and took up a ton of my desk, but that phone had the worst UX. I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do, maybe with better audio quality. I didn't want a phone that demanded my attention to do things.
- chii 8y ago> I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do This is what happens when the buyer (or cheque signer!) is not a user. To make a sale, the phone vendors has to bid or propose, and for them to stand out, phone needs features. Whether those features make sense or not probably matters less than whether they "beat" the competitors' feature list. I wonder if there's a way to delegate to the actual users of tools and equipment, the responsibility of evaluating said tool?
- Nasrudith 8y agoYes there is trivially - give the end user the budget to buy their own. However there are some real logistical disadvantages to that approach as well and frankly many workplaces are far too hierarchally minded to the point of being insulted at the concept of asking the employees what they think.
- selestify 8y agoWhat are the logistical disadvantages? Can't the buyer also take care of logistics?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIf you standardize on one model, you can order in bulk (and store the excess for new employees or to replace broken units).
- chii 8y ago> What are the logistical disadvantages? if each user chose their own model, then the problem of integrating all the phones into the network and/or calendar system etc may be intractably hard.
- Godel_unicode 8y agoThis works great until there's a problem of any kind. Then the users of the special snowflake phones will scream about IT not helping them. Standards exist for a reason.
- nradov 8y agoI thought most companies had pretty much stopped buying hardware phones and switched to soft phones to reduce costs. We've been using Cisco soft phones (Jabber) for years. It's not perfect but good enough. Users can customize ringer devices and volume.
- Declanomous 8y agoEh, I really depends. I think softphones are great if you use the phone infrequently, or if you use the phone so often that you always have a headset on. If you use the phone a several times a day for really short periods using a softphone is a pain. That's not even taking the average age of the employee into account. I worked at a place where the average employee was probably 45 or so.