My answer to "life, the universe and everything"
Why do cell phones have color screens and yet voicemail prompts are still voice only? For those of us who get the newest phones, we still are stuck with a system from the late ’90s. There’s no reason for this. Fortunately, Apple has done something about it with their visual voicemail feature on the iPhone. And remember 37signals wants to help make this visual phone system. Remember that they have made some really killer apps.
Update: I talked about this a bit last year.
So I called Greyhound the other day for a trip to Los Angeles for the coming weekend. They had what I thought was kind of a weird interface for making reservations. Rather than the new (but still annoying) computers that can process what people say over the phone, they have you navigate a set of menus to tell the system where you are leaving and where you are going. For example, “if you are leaving from a city in that starts with San or Santa, press (2 or something).” Their website is better, but it doesn’t have a way of checking your itinerary as easy as Southwest Airlines (though most airlines don’t have anything as good as Southwest).
Some company really needs to implement showing those menus on the screens of cell phones like 37signals (one of the best design firms) suggests. It could actually make phone systems easier than Internet systems.
So I called Greyhound the other day for a trip to Los Angeles for the coming weekend. They had what I thought was kind of a weird interface for making reservations. Rather than the new (but still annoying) computers that can process what people say over the phone, they have you navigate a set of menus to tell the system where you are leaving and where you are going. For example, “if you are leaving from a city in that starts with San or Santa, press (2 or something).” Their website is better, but it doesn’t have a way of checking your itnenary as easy as Southwest Airlines (though most airlines don’t have anything as good as Southwest).
Some company really needs to implement showing those menus on the screens of cell phones like 37signals (one of the best design firms) suggests. It could actually make phone systems easier than Internet systems.