Abstract
A hardware incompatibility in a telephone call waiting system with direct effects on the end users required a rapid solution. Designers proposed to address this incompatibility by increasing the tone components of each call waiting pattern. The Human Factors Group reviewed this proposed solution and were concerned that it might lead to unacceptable durations of call interruption, and to discrimination problems in some cases.
Experiment 1 was conducted to explore these concerns. Although the study was conducted in a laboratory setting, a rather novel attempt was made to simulate realistic motivation and attention. An “Artificial Caller” was used in the form of professional comedy routines which appeared to work very satisfactorily. The results of Experiment 1 suggested that discrimination of the patterns was not a significant problem. Participants did find the longest of the lengthened patterns to be somewhat disruptive of the simulated telephone call. However, the disruption caused by the longest pattern may still be marginally acceptable to actual users.
A second study explored a different approach to solving the hardware incompatibility. New patterns were generated which maintained the identification levels and suggested the possibility of less call disruption for the longest patterns. Further work is briefly discussed.
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