Rich Unger's Blog

Crying Wolf With Keyguard

This is going to be the most off-topic post I've done yet, but it's a UI issue, and a potentially very dangerous one, and I thought my few readers might get a kick out of this.

Yesterday, I received a call on my new cell phone from the police emergency switchboard. They said, "We have an open circuit on your cell phone. Is there an emergency?" There wasn't, and I felt suitably shamed to have wasted valuable 911 switchboard time.

So should Sanyo UI engineers.

I upgraded my 5-year old Sanyo cell phone to their newest stick (non-flip) model. I like the stick models. Just a personal preference. The important thing about stick phones is that you need keyguard. Keyguard is when you set the phone to not accept input unless you hold down one particular button for a few seconds. This prevents the exposed keypad from accidentally dialing while it's in your pocket.

Well, my new phone has keyguard. It also has a special emergency "feature" which overrides keyguard to let you dial 911 without losing those precious few seconds it takes to turn off keyguard. You can't dial anything else except 911. You can't dial 119, or 919 ... just 911. In other words, at first, no key works except 9. Then, no key works except 1. Then, again, nothing but 1 will produce a result.

Do you see where I'm going with this? If the phone is in my pocket, and ALL the buttons are mashed long enough, it is guaranteed that the phone will dial 911.

Here in the Bay Area, 911 switchboards are already undermanned. Now we have Sanyo phones tying up the phone lines with button-mashing calls.

Thanks a lot, Sanyo.

Comments

• Same with Siemens in Italy:
  emergency numbers are 112 and 113, and of course I did my useless calls a couple of times...

  Posted by: megadix on December 15, 2005 at 05:02 AM

• Actually, from what I understand, all GSM phones are required to be able to dial the emergence services (911 in the U.S., 112 in the EU, 999 in the UK) with or without the keypad lock on. The reasoning, I guess, was that anyone (not necessarily the owner) could pick up a mobile phone and make an emergency call without being familiar with the phone. I've had the same experience as you but I can understand the reasoning behind the UI. All my Nokia's and Sony Ericsson phones have behaved this way.

  Posted by: hopeless on December 16, 2005 at 04:17 AM

• How about clearing the 9 if 1 isn't pressed within 5 seconds? Or have [2-8] clear a partially dialled 911? There's any number of ways to meet the requirement without making random number mashing guarantee an accidental 911 call. This is lazy UI design, pure and simple, and it's burdening our emergency switchboards.

  Posted by: richunger on December 16, 2005 at 09:00 AM

• Same with my Siemens in France: I can type 112 even with keyboard locked. It displays then two menu items: Delete or SOS. So it needs 4 keypresses in a specific order to make the call, and if one of the keypresses waits too long, the whole procedure is cancelled.
  So it is quite OK.

  Note that some phones doesn't rely on a long press on one key to unlock. Nokia phones require a two distant (on keyboard) keypress combo to unlock (and lock). Of course, it displays the combo if any key is pressed.

  Posted by: philho on March 21, 2006 at 04:04 AM

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