Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Why Mobile Phones are Annoying (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
This is a summary of some research done at the University of York by Andrew Monk and colleagues - they conducted some experiments involving unsuspecting bystanders who were subjected to a conversation nearby involving either 2 people nearby or just 1 person talking on a mobile phone.
Some interesting findings, which I have seen wondered about before, and have wondered about myself. The most interesting thing is that people find phone conversations louder and more annoying than face-to-face conversations of the same volume. The major problem seems to be that we can't tune out of 'half' conversations as easily as we can wih whole ones, ie when we only hear one person's part we find it harder to ignore. my feeling is that there is some work to be done here looking at how people respond to problems - to me half a conversation is a problem waiting to be solved: what *is* the other person saying that means this person is saying *that*?
will there ever be a solution to the problem of annoying mobile phones? well, maybe, but only if NASA get their subvocal speech thing working.
Update: BBC News now has a piece on this, which shows that the researchers have had similar thoughts to my own.
This is a summary of some research done at the University of York by Andrew Monk and colleagues - they conducted some experiments involving unsuspecting bystanders who were subjected to a conversation nearby involving either 2 people nearby or just 1 person talking on a mobile phone.
Some interesting findings, which I have seen wondered about before, and have wondered about myself. The most interesting thing is that people find phone conversations louder and more annoying than face-to-face conversations of the same volume. The major problem seems to be that we can't tune out of 'half' conversations as easily as we can wih whole ones, ie when we only hear one person's part we find it harder to ignore. my feeling is that there is some work to be done here looking at how people respond to problems - to me half a conversation is a problem waiting to be solved: what *is* the other person saying that means this person is saying *that*?
will there ever be a solution to the problem of annoying mobile phones? well, maybe, but only if NASA get their subvocal speech thing working.
Update: BBC News now has a piece on this, which shows that the researchers have had similar thoughts to my own.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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