The modern landline phone design

My partner Bushra Tasneem and I chose to redesign the landline phone on the wall near the entrance of the room. The main focus of our redesign centered around the fact that most people have personal phones nowadays, so this landline phone would more likely be used in an emergency situation, or for calling people in the building.

Wall mounted landline phone, much like the one we redesigned.

Our prototype of the newly designed phone.

Focusing on the emergency aspect, we added more buttons on the bottom of the interface that had pre-programmed emergency numbers. Hopefully with these buttons the phone will better serve its purpose of being used in emergencies. Users will not have to think of or look up the emergency numbers. In seeing the other group interact with our prototype we realized that the shorthand we used to express certain numbers (Campo, Non-Emergency line) were not intuitive. We faced this issue with shorthand we used for other buttons (Speaker, Voice Command) as well. In a second redesign we would need to change these to be as intuitive as possible, perhaps taking notes from other designs already existing.

The other big change we made was adding a large touchscreen and the ability to video call. On the touchscreen users will be able to scroll through a directory of relevant people that they might need to contact. Since it is a more modern screen, we could even have a photo of the individual next to their directory entry as well. With the ability to video call, it will be easier to address and explain problems directly to the person being called. However, the group that interacted with our prototype pointed out that it might still not be accessible, since the camera and phone is not able to move around the room with the user.

Another issue we want to fix, not shown in the prototype, is that the phone was mounted way too high to be accessible to everyone. I even had to tippy toe to see the screen. We also wanted to add the numbers in braille over their respective buttons. With our design changes we hope to have made the wall mounted landline phone more accessible and fitting of its uses today.