One more unto the topic of User Interfaces, dear friends, once more....
OK, maybe twice more; this post is a twofer.
Those noisy froggies in the swamp? I decided to get a measurement. Installed a couple of sound level measuring apps on my phone. Both show the swamp noise being 75 to 80 dBA close up. Probably more if I took a chair out there, sat down, and waited for the nearby critters to start back up (they get real quiet when something moves near them).
And! Both apps have reset buttons, for clearing the peak reading. All well and good, except that touching the button causes a "sound" spike at the microphone. Hey, guys? Maybe consider having a delay between button press and resuming acquisition?
The second topic: I bought a pair of Midland X-Talker FRS walkie-talkies for communication around the yard. Nice feature set and all that, including built-in weather radio, but... there's that big "SCAN" button. One brief and possibly inadvertent press of that, and the radio commences scanning for channels with activity on them. There's no warning that this is happening (unless you're looking at the display, which is unlikely in such a situation), and no correspondingly easy way to return to the channel you had set. For a "family" radio system, this is Bad. There really ought to be a configuration option to lock out the scan function and keep the radio tuned to the family's settings. Or a molly-guard over the button. Something.
For that matter, it'd be nice to have a kids-n-seniors walkie-talkie, with most of the controls hidden - maybe configured over a USB connection? Anyway, something with On/Off/Volume, CALL, and push-to-talk and not much else accessible to the assigned user, but fully compatible with the FRS system and configurable by the owner. Configure it for the family settings, hand it over to Junior or Grandma, and don't worry about the channel getting inadvertently changed, etc.
Update: The whole concept of automated phone calls for legitimate purposes is a giant UI fail in itself. I just got a call, on my phone, for my father, from one of his insurance companies. "Is this your father, yes or no?" Er... hang on a moment. I'm not him, but he's nearby. Actually, you need to talk to Joy. (None of these is an acceptable response.) As I was heading off in search of the family, the robot told me a number to call back, which I didn't write down, because I was standing up and also I hadn't been primed to grab a pencil and paper. The bot only said it once, apparently on the assumption that I'm an answering machine.
Yeah, I know the assumption nowadays is that everyone has a unique phone number, and that there's no longer any such thing as a shared family phone number. This is a bad assumption, and we've had trouble with it on multiple occasions.
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