iotum’s Talk-Now eXperience
It seems that iotum’s Talk-Now is getting some well-deserved traction! Unfortunately for me, just before I was about to try Talk-Now on my Pearl, I lost the device to our dev team… the sacrifices we make!! But, I’ve seen Alec demo the service a few times. If you’re a BB user – it’s worth trying.
Think of it as an “availability wizard”… It uses your contact list from your device, mashes it up with your scheduling information and assigns an availability code to each person or group. The codes include available, not available and interruptible. That’s what your caller sees before they attempt to call you. Talk-Now even incorporates some cross-media functionality with the option of sending a “Call me now” email directly from the contact list.
Managing the Talk-Now service is super easy – from a simple and well-designed web portal.
From an information architecture perspective, the flow of Talk-Now is non-disruptive, efficient and effective.
As for the mobile user experience – I have a wish list! Being a J2ME app – the designers have a lot of flexibility in the GUI. There’s not as many constraints as you’d find in a Windows Mobile environment for example. So… spice up that UI! The only major problem with Talk-Now’s design is the sole use of color as a coding mechanism. Color alone is not very salient for users – and it breaks any compliance to accessibility rules (ADA 508 etc…) It’s an easy problem to fix!
Overall – a very promising solution!
Tags: iotum, Talk-Now, Blackberry, J2ME, ADA
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