McFilter

Managing wireless interruptions

This article on wireless email from silicon.com (I think registration might be required, but it is free) discusses some of the pros and cons of being always connected. It mentions the advantage of silent mode allowing you to get that important message from a customer, or wife, etc. whilst in a meeting and then discreetly respond/excuse yourself/whatever, but also points out that you get increasingly interrupted with trivia and so reduces your productivity or concentration in the meeting.

This is an area of mobile devices that I've long though could be improved, and maybe sometime I'll look into whether I can develop something for smartphones that does this - for now I'll just rant about it on my weblog instead :-)

What I think mobile devices need are a more advanced set of profiles, and an easy way to switch between them. My Sony Z5 is excellent at switching profiles - when the flip is closed, pushing back on the thumbwheel lets me spin through the four profiles, so it's easy to switch to silent mode when I go into a meeting/theatre/cinema/whatever, and just as easy to switch back afterwards. It seems to be a bit harder to do on this Nokia 7650 I've got to play with - if the keypad is locked I've got to unlock that first, then press the on/off key, then move to the joystick and scroll down to the profile I want - just that bit too cumbersome for me to do quickly as I switch modes, and it needs to be a trivial operation.

The reason I think switching profiles is important is that the phone isn't the focus of my attention when I'm switching profiles - I don't want to use the phone for the task I'm doing, I'm just giving it some more context to what I'm up to.

You could argue, and I think everyone I've ever seen mention things like this does, that the phone could know when you're in a meeting from your calendar information. Am I the only person in the world who doesn't live their life by an online calendar?!?!! Sure, some of my meetings, etc. get into my calendar, but most don't, so I need something that makes it easy for me, the user, to switch profiles too - if the phone also switches profiles based on my calendar info then that's an added bonus, but it needs to be that way round, and not the other.

Anyway, now that we've got a way for me to easily update the phone (/mobile device) with my current context, we can get onto the interesting bit :-) It should be possible for me to define my own profiles, which allow me to choose which message/calls/interruptions are allowed to actually interrupt me in any specific profile (all numbers, just those in my contacts, just contacts X, Y and Z, etc.). As a further enhancement, it should be possible for there to be a dialogue between the caller and my phone - so, for example, your wife calls, and the phone answers the call because you're in your "in a meeting" profile - it then gives her the option (either with a "press 1 for blah, 2 for wibble" voice menu, or by popping up a dialog box on her phone) of overriding the profile to still interrupt you, so she can decide how important the message is.

The difficult bit in all of this is making the UI easy enough to use to define the profiles. And I must admit that I haven't worked out any answers to that, other than thinking it would possibly be better to allow them to be configured off the handset - but that's just part of a separate UI rant of mine about using PCs as a peripheral device to improve interaction with my phone (which isn't to say that it shouldn't be possible on the handset, it must, but if it's easier to do initial setup on something with a big screen, a proper keyboard and a mouse, then that option should be explored).