Dear Skype - Let me Choose my Own Integrations (Goggins Principle of Integrations)

The New Skype Conference Call Bonanza!
Less than a year ago I discovered a useful application for Skype - Collaborating with people in an online course I was taking. Previously, the telephone was more than sufficient, but when people are all over the country and need to have a conference call, it turns out Skype is actually a good solution. In fact, when I discovered that "conference calling" on my home phone meant "3 people only", and that even my work lines supported the "3 people only" limitation (Always the optimist), I realized I could "Skype" up to 10 people at once on my home phone for a mere $29.95 per *year*.

That's a good price to be able to call any phone in north america *and* perform conference calls beyond the wildest imaginings of my phone company. So, plunk. I instantly (within less than an hour... though skype says it could take "up to" an hour for your account to be activated) had 6 people on regular telephones hooked up on my MAC at home via a Skype conference call. How cool is *that*!?

So far - So good.

Here's the simple "skype interface" on my MAC:



















This was all good until I logged into my PC, where I also have Skype (alas, I have not been able to rid my workplace of the Windows virus; Mostly because, as it turns out, .NET is a much more efficient development environment than Eclipse). At first - No problem...












But then I opened Outlook ... and noticed the extra help Skype was providing me immediately - Every single contact in my contact list was included by default... In effect, I could not longer "find" my skype contacts.

Since I use Skype during the day to chat with colleagues, friends and peers around the world, not being able to see these people any longer posed a bit of a challenge.

Fortunately, I did eventually find, hidden in a series of drop down menus, a check box to "turn off" this feature and return Skype to its previous utility.






Heuristics and Theories
Several popular blogs and authors have offered up their heuristics for user interface design... Some of my favorites are:
Jakob Nielsen's &
Bruce Tognazzini's.

These websites, along with prominent theories of HCI offer some indication of how this Skype feature may be "wrong". Tognazzini, for example, notes that "efficiency for the user" is important. Nielsen notes that system status should be visible and that user control and freedom are important.

Cognitive work analysis and its strong ecological orientation in problems of interaction design would lead one to question how a tool like Skype interacts with its environment, and how the work of the user might be effected by new features. This is a broad theory, and within it one could certainly make a case for Skype assuming the importance of my contact list and choosing to incorporate it for me once I chose to use Skype to call regular phones. For some users, this might be the right choice. For somebody like me, who has over 300 contacts in outlook, Skype's choice rendered their tool temporarily "almost useless". Cognitive work analysis could have very well led the designers of skype to create this feature and having it behave the way it does. In so doing, for many users the amount of work associated with contacting people on regular phones would be substantially reduced. A more effective way of dealing with this issue, which would account for people like me with over 300 contacts *and* users with fewer contacts is exemplified by the latest version of Windows Mobile. On a Windows Mobile power PDA Phone, when you start dialing a number *OR* spelling a name, it first navigates matching phone numbers *AND* names in your contact list. The Skype implementation of this would allow me to type "Se..." and have it start to bring up contacts whose names start with "Se", such as "Sean Connery", "Sean Puffy Combs", "Steven Segal" and "Seth Greenberg".

Both solutions result from a reasonable application of cognitive work analysis to UI design. The difference is simply in the consideration of how the feature set works in different kinds of test cases.

Let me Choose my Own Integrations
In the absence of a clear rule set that I know well, I will label Skype's choice as a violation of the Goggins Principle of Integrations, which simply states that I should get to choose where software I install connects with other software I've already installed, and no software I install should assume that I want it to play with everything else on my system. Alternately, they could consider the Windows Mobile design.