Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone (08 Apr 2005) Annoyance with others comes from many sources. Some might consider this a social issue, but there might very well be technological solutions. After all, it is the technology that has provided the affordance -- the technical terms that describes the ability to do some action -- that is so annoying. Perhaps we could refine the technology so that it better affords politeness to others. Consider the loud voices people use while on the phone. There are a number of issues that determine how loudly a person talks in conversation, a major issue being whether or not it the recipient appears to hear. With a telephone, because the recipient is known to be at a distance and is, moreover, not visible, there is a natural tendency to speak loudly. Notice that speaking level is determined, in part, by auditory feedback -- how loudly one hears their own voice. With the modern mobile telephone, there is no feedback of one's own voice in the receiver. Article URL: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/minimizing_the_annoy.html Read 71 more articles from Don Norman sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Mobile social computing: From research to product     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy