The Value of Users in Design

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I’m on a bit of a rant at the moment.  iotum has just moved into new offices, and we’ve put in a spiffy new IP PBX.  Until now, we’ve been running our business in true startup mode: a single Vonage line with a couple of softphones for extensions.  My office and Howard’s were next to each other.  If the phone rang, we heard it, and one of us answered it on either of the analog handsets we had installed on the Vonage box. 

We broke down and got a PBX in the new offices. In recent months I’ve been using Gizmo Project, or Skype, for virtually all of my outgoing calls.  I’m spoiled.  I’ve become used to the softphone and much prefer a headset to a handset.  However, now that we’ve got a PBX, neither Gizmo Project, nor Skype, can be used as an extension on it.  Both products only work with the service they were designed for. 

No problem, sez I, I will just go find another softphone.  Easier said than done.  It’s as if I have returned to the dark ages of software design.  The hunt for a decent softphone is proving to be very very difficult. 

1. Most have only extremely primitive integration with Outlook, which kills one of my favorite features: dial-by-name. 
2. They all handle multiple soundcards badly, or not at all.  I have a laptop with an analog soundcard, and a USB headset attached.  I want the ring tones to be played on the sound card (so I can hear them), and the headset / microphone to be used for the actual call. 
3. Most have incredibly poor design.  I’m a Windows user, and I expect Windows apps to behave like… Windows apps!  Go read the Windows UI style guide, folks.  Options are part of a top level menu called Tools.  They’re not called Properties, they don’t hang off the File Menu, and so on…  I’m singling out the designer of X-Lite out for a special place in hell.  It emulates a cell phone interface on the PC desktop, right down to the glare on the screen, and left and right arrow keys to navigate menus just like a GSM phone. 

At the moment, I’m back to a plastic handset hooked into a cheap ATA.  I take as few calls on it as I can, and encourage everyone I know to get a Gizmo Project account. 

If you know of a decent, standards based, softphone that works well with SIP PBX’s, please let me know.

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.