We're in the midst of trailing Jabber as a softphone for people, both on computers (Windows, Mac) and on mobile (iPhone, Android). One of the really awkward things we're finding around usability has to do with phone ring tones.
- There's not a "no ring" option in Jabber for Windows. We have people that would rather have just the toast and not the sound. This has caused laptops to start ringing, often quite loudly, in the middle of meetings where people bring their laptops to the conference rooms, for example.
- There's not a way to use status to impact the rings. For example, "in a meeting" or "busy" should mute the ringer (see above).
- The Windows client changes the speaker it rings on frequently. Can there be a way to actually see under the hood and configure this? People have phones on their desks already and have selected ringers there and now get startled when they are in their offices and the physical phone, the computer, and the cell phone in their pocket all light up with all of these ring tones, all half a second out of sync...
- On cell phones, people want to be able to set "working hours" so that they are not receiving calls outside of working hours automatically. This can be particularly disruptive since many people are keeping their phones next to their beds at night and the last thing people want is a vendor cold call waking them up at odd hours. Ideally it would be a setting on the mobile app itself, but if users could configure in the self-service portal as an alternative, that might be acceptable.
