Taking advantage of the familiarity of computer keyboard and the function and logic of a traditional phone.

Embedded visual feedback for intuitive use of the device

Keybphone is an integrated system, combining the tactile feedback of a physical device with the ease of database management of a digital computer. The user testing revealed that the visual feedback was considered of upmost importance in accessing the phone functions without any extra effort and assuring the user of the true state of the system

Physical integration

Many users agreed on the fact that the current phone system is taking lots of space on the desktop, not only due to the machine's footprint, but also as a result of cables cluttering the rest of the table.

Merging the keyboard and the phone device, this cluttering can be diminished. Ease of use, good tactile feedback, familiar device to use.

Digital integration

An acknowledged problem with the existing system was found to be the access of internal phone list. For that, the College has a web based datasheet and a printout version of the names. People used the printed version overwhelmingly more often. Integrating the phonelist database over the net to every individual phone device enables the list to be up to date all the time. Also, it can be smootlhy integrated with the other contact information database that individuals use alongside with the email contact database, building up individuals' personal phonelist.

One recognised problem was the complicatedness and tedious use of voicemail. By integrating the voicemail to local computer enables one to access the messages instaneously, not having to listen through all the descriptions what functions of the voicemail database are available to the user at any given time. Bundling this with the voice recognition, the user can get a good picture of the content of the stored message at glance, and postpone dealing with it in a case of rush.

Familiarity

Computer is the de facto standard on almost every office worker's table. Hence, as an interface it is very familiar to people. It provides an interface that responds to the user physically; one knows when a key is pressed and when not. Over time people also grow familiar with their keyboard, learn its sensitivity and dimensions

Fast typing of names and numbers

Ordinary phone device is very quick in keying in numbers, but when it comes to searching databases of names, it gets clumsy. With predictive typing, (similar to the web browsers) in names or numbers the accessibility of large phone number databases can be made easily accessible. Also, the numpad was found to be relatively unused among the office workers. Only those who really need to type lots of numbers often have adapted the other end of the keyboard for that purpose. Naturally, for the ones who use the keypad often, the phone functions can be deactivated for use in other applications.

Feedback

An imporant element was considered to be giving clear clues of the current state of the phone, whether a person is on hold, being transferred etc. The approach was taken to use visual clues on top of the ordinary auditive feedback. Further, this kind of feedback was aimed at being "in situ" as much as possible, the clue being embedded in the device where appropriate. An onscreen representation was abandoned in the process due to it being easily too arbitrarily connected to the physical act of phoning, just making things more complicated.

Aesthetic

The visual feedback in the form of underlit keyboard buttons draw their aesthetics from low res computer graphics and games, such as the legendary "Snake". Buttons are lit in specific order to create an illusion of movement hence directing the manifestation of an abstract functioning of telephone data into more accessible form.