graffiti in experience

by shiren vijiasingam

June 18, 2010

We want control of how our phone rings!

C’mon RIM, get it together with those sound profiles already. The blackberry UI is a marvel in user experience. No unnecessary menus, minimalist options, keyboard HFE (human factors engineering) that’s just top-notch.

Yet they fall short in one of the critical areas of the device. Notifications. Here’s what your users are seeking, for starters -

  1. The ability to create time-based profile switching – phone-only mode after 11pm, work-friendly mode at 9am etc. Even better, an optional meeting mode, based on your calendar.
  2. Contact exceptions that abide by the overall profile setting – if I set a custom ringtone for a contact, then put my phone in vibrate mode, I want the phone to vibrate even if that contact calls. The custom ring should only apply when the phone is in audible ring modes (loud, phone only etc.)
  3. Ability to duplicate existing default profiles as a custom profiles – You may want to copy the phone only mode, but modify it slightly so that a partciular email account issues an audible alert – for those that need to remain on-call, for example, but don’t want sleep interrupted by those marketing emails in other accounts at 3am.
  4. Global message type settings that can be set at a custom level as exceptions – I want all my emails to vibrate 3 times, in vibrate mode. I don’t want to have to set that for each email account. If I need an exception, I can set that for any particular account. E.g. a ‘on-call’ account that dings even in phone only mode.