Lateral Thinking around how to get a title on a Voice Note
One the problems I had to solve is a great example of the intersection of development and design. It was exactly in the space IA's and Designers are always required to work. The code you're working with has been built in such a way that it allows for no good user experience. Somehow you have try and squeeze a reasonably decent one out of it.
More specifically the problem arose because the Notes app system allowed for text and voice. Text notes weren't really a problem of course, they'd been designed with some comparative research in mind. So just like everywhere else, the user enters some text, gives it a title (or not, in the first iteration), clicks submit or something, and poof, it's live. Voice can somewhat be done the same way, except that, much to the confusion of our user base, you didn't USE THE COMPUTER to add your voice to the computer.
Voice notes are created when the user dialed a special number and left a voice message at the other end. That message would get converted to MP3 and posted to the site. It was pretty neat to watch peoples eyes light up when they got through the process and heard their own voice on the web.
For each user on each site that they were a part of there was a specific PIN, and the phone number dialed was always the same (I think). In principle, the user could be at a soccer game, call the number, punch in the PIN and start leaving a message. When they hung up, it would go live on their family site.
The rub was the title. All of our notes were sort of organized and identifiable primarily by their title. That's no problem for a text note, as the user was always in front of the computer, and you could force them to enter one. There was no way to force their hand, or voice for that matter, over the phone, and we HAD TO HAVE a text title.
I asked our Usability Specialist, Dr. Alexander Muir to help guide me in a creative exercise whereby we'd address this problem.
A few days before this I had finished Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats and I was excited to try and "think laterally" about this issue, if just for a few minutes. So Alexander and I ducked into a room with a board, and together we imagined a variety of absurd, and not so absurd ways, that a title could be assigned to voice notes.
All I can say is it worked. We had a bunch of ideas that I certainly would have come to as quickly if I'd stuck to my normal ways of thinking. Only one idea was used of course, at the time, but we got some good future ideas, out of it right away. And we sorta solved the problem WAY faster than we would have if we'd gotten a bunch of heads in a room, and overtalked the issue.
The trick is not to jump to how or why, just imagine infinite resources or something. You can get around the standard limitations of logical training, by being a little more illogical.
Here's the list of ideas:
Ways a title can be assigned to a voice note
- Company chosen title "Myfamily.com VoiceNote"
- Computer title "Userid:110546" (or filename)
- You title (created by author) (could be done before, during or after note creation)
- No title (worth considering?)
- Titled by another person (Admin or anybody)
- Rotating set of titles (chosen at random?)
- My Titles (viewer customizable preset titles)
- Choose Preset Title
The last one was our favorite because it seemed to carry a lot of interesting benefits. You could use a phone menu to deal with a limited set, it could be managed by the user or a site administrator, it's easier to choose than to create.
Either way I have to attest to DeBono's ideas. I'd really like to learn more an try more full-fledged implementations of Lateral Thinking, Six Hats stuff in the future.