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John Chin*, Gregory Tatchell**
*AT&T Bell Labs
200 Laurel Avenue
Middletown, NJ 07748
**Stentor Resource Center, Inc.
4535 Canada Way
Nurnaby, B.C., Canada, V5G 1J0
Collectively, this suite of five papers illustrate the diverse set of issues that should be addressed to formulate a strategic path towards resolving existing and growing usability problems found in telecommunications. Specifically, there are three main thrusts applied in developing profitable and competitive new services:
1) identifying sources of usability problems
2 exploring potential design solutions that address current and future user needs
3) implementing prototypes to assess the feasibility of design
concepts.
Typically, customers subscribe to only a few of the many different
telephony features available in the network. The lack of subscription
to these features is attributed to the myriad confusing codes,
rings, tones and announcements associated with the usage of these
network services. Over 30 different usability problems have been
identified in existing telephony customer interface associated
with these services [1]. The complex interactions between these
services create unintended side effects. These service interactions
become more pronounced when greater intelligence and functionality
is introduced into network services [2]. The ultimate challenge
for future intelligent network services is to resolve these interactions
in a manner natural to users of communication services.
We believe that a fifth generation telephony customer interface
is the solution to creating a usable local access network. As
we replace the archaic touch-tone interface of today with a desirable,
intuitive, interactive, intelligent agent based, voice activated
customer interface, we believe it can stimulate the same exponential
growth in local access services as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
have done for computer based services.
A conversational interaction with an agent must be defined by
the social context in which telephony applications will be used.
Market research has been conducted to determine users needs and
the types of tasks that may be delegated to agents. The function
of agents may be viewed in terms of occupations or professions
(i.e. butlers). Delegation of tasks must begin with proper job
description for the agent application [3]. The nature of the agent-user
interaction is defined by user expectations and perceptions of
the personality or image of the system. Before future systems
are designed, user perceptions of current systems (i.e. voice
mail) should be assessed. Once desirable characteristics or personality
traits are identified, they should be incorporated into future
agent-based products. Future anthropomorphic agents need to be
designed with personalities that are appropriate for novice and
expert users [4].
A concept prototype was built to support scenario based user interactions
that addressed specific customer needs, including: a) security
with speaker identity verification, b) call origination and screening
with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and c) seamless integration
of features across wireline and wireless services. The prototype
utilized a platform that emulates the potential future configuration
and network architecture of these agent-based services [5].