Exploring PC-telephone convergence with the enhanced telephony prototype

Industry trends suggest that the PC and telephone user experiences will converge over the next several years. This convergence raises important questions for the HCI community: how should the PC-phone user experience be designed, and how does PC-phone technology affect work practices? This paper focuses on the first question and provides some initial data on the second question. We describe a PC-phone prototype we built called Enhanced Telephony, and we report data from an eight month field deployment of Enhanced Telephony within our company where over 7,000 people installed the prototype. Results indicate that PC-phone software is a promising technology for the workplace and that the most valuable features may be those that help people manage their incoming calls.