On Preventing Telephony Feature Interactions which are Shared-Control Mode Confusions

Jan BREDEREKE

Universität Bremen, FB 3 · P.O. box 330 440 · D-28334 Bremen · Germany
brederek@tzi.de · www.tzi.de/˜brederek

Abstract. We demonstrate that many undesired telephony feature interactions are also shared-control mode confusions. A mode confusion occurs when the observed behaviour of a technical system is out of sync with the behaviour of the user’s mental model of it. Several measures for preventing mode confusions are known in the literature on human-computer interaction. We show that these measures can be applied to this kind of feature interaction. We sketch several more measures for the telephony domain.