Human factors challenges in creating a principal support office system—the speech filing system approach

This paper identifies the key behavioral challenges in designing a principal-support office system and our approaches to them. These challenges included designing a system which office principals would find useful and would directly use themselves. Ultimately, the system, called the Speech Filing System (SFS), became primarily a voice store and forward message system with which users compose, edit, send, and receive audio messages, using telephones as terminals. Our approaches included behavioral analyses of principals' needs and irritations, controlled laboratory experiments, several years of training, observing, and interviewing hundreds of actual SFS users, several years of demonstrating SFS to thousands of potential users and receiving feedback, empirical studies of alternative methods of training and documentation, continual major modifications of the user interface, simulations of alternative user interfaces, and actual SFS usage analyses. The results indicate that SFS is now relatively easy to learn, solves real business problems, and leads to user satisfaction.