my everyday thing

“My Everyday Thing”
By: Mary Lowery

The item I have chosen as my “everyday thing” is my house phone. I chose this device due to the features that it shows on the phone but does not give you any clue how to operate those features. For instance, one of the buttons shows LOUD/SEARCH with four arrows in the NSEW directions; you would think that by pressing the arrows it would change the volume and / or some kind of search capability. It does not, no matter which arrow direction or button you push, so I would have to say that the mapping sucks, because the buttons fail to operate as expected.

The ‘hold’ button does not put a call on hold, instead when pressed, it reads ‘press extension to call.’ When pressing the ‘conf’ button instead of a conference call as expected, you get ‘save directory.’ So as you can see, although this phone works if you just want to utilize the number buttons or speakerphone. The affordances of this object have constraints. Conceptually, the phone features did not function / work as I expected them to.

Now, what I come to believe is that these functions only work when you are actually on a call. So to see if this is true, I used my cell phone to call the house phone and began to push these feature buttons to see if they did indeed work. The conceptual model of this device had good intentions, however if you wanted to change the ringer volume by hitting the volume button, it does not work. The volume button is actually to turn up or lower the amplification of the earpiece.

In conclusion, this phone does not meet the criteria of Norman’s design of everyday things.