Everyday UI: Accepting, Declining, and NOW Respectfully Ignoring Calls
Ever been in the situation where your sibling, parent, or friend — and anyone else for that matter — calls you and you want to ignore their call without actually declining their call WHILE being able to still use your phone? I definitely have! Although I know that I cannot do that, when receiving a call I, nonetheless, attempt to press the home button by indication of the mental model embedded in me as if it is going to successfully exit the call screen and enter the home screen. To my dismay, I rediscover that this does not work and I am stuck waiting for either the caller to give and hang up or waiting for the designated time before my automated voicemail message comes on.
During a call, whether it is FaceTime or a regular phone call, Apple devices allow you to exit the call screen and navigate through your phone peacefully. This is a great design choice because often people tend to multitask and/or simply feel unproductive during a phone call so they are given the liberty to choose to do something else. Similarly, I believe that this feature should be extended to an incoming call so as to not prevent a user from enjoying the functionality of their iPhones.
The reason I believe that Apple did not already choose to implement this feature into their software was because they attempted to draw a direct correlation from earlier telephones. Earlier telephones did not have extra features and were solely used for communicating. In this manner, the only options were accepting a call or letting the ringer go off until the attempted call ended.
“Accept” and “Decline” are the only options when receiving a call on an iPhone. However, tapping “Decline” allows the caller to know that the person being called has rejected their call because by default the ringer will stop on their end as well. This can cause the caller to perhaps feel offended if they do not understand the circumstances under which the person being called chose to decline their call.Through a new implementation, though, the awkwardness of declining a call can easily be avoided.
This design can maintain some regular “Incoming Call” features intact such as still playing a ringtone and/or vibrate while the call is incoming to ensure that the user of any given iPhone user is properly notified of this call. The main difference however would be that once the call screen is reached, functionality of the home button would resume. Furthermore, there would be a notification tab on the top most part of the screen indicating to the user that there is an incoming call and they can still choose either to accept or decline. Ultimately, this enables users to be able to navigate their phones during an incoming call while not straightaway declining the call.