Content area
Full Text
On an overcast September morning in Woodstock, Ill., more than 100 people gather at the tiny town's historic opera house. They are there to kick off deployment and testing of Ameritech's Clearpath digital cellular serviceand learn a little-known fact.
The test towns in the regional phone company's popular TV ads are real.
"Not only are they real, but we owe our success to the people who test our products," said Jay Ellison, regional vice president of Ameritech Cellular, addressing the corn-belt crowd of local residents, company personnel, and media representatives. "We gain valuable information from people like [those in our commercials]."
For almost two years, Ameritech has positioned itself as a provider of innovative, user-friendly services with an award-winning "Human Factors" ad campaign that gives Midwestern viewers a peek inside test towns. The towns in the campaign are bucolic communities where colorful characters try advanced telecommunications products before they hit the market.
There's Mayor Marge, who uses a voice-recognition service on her convertible's cell phone as she drums up the vote, accompanied by her poodle. The ice fishermen, one of whom hates fish, who modem a grocery order from their icehouse. And perhaps bestknown are the denizens of the test-town diner, all of whom are wired up to some futuristic appliance or another.
Few watching the humorous ads may realize it, but there is truth in Ameritech's advertising. Through its human factors department and a real-life test-town program, the baby Bell has tested and introduced a wide variety of new products and services. What's the basic tenet behind this? Like the ad says, "If technology doesn't work for people, it doesn't work." What Ameritech calls "human factors" is a broadly defined research philosophy involving "the study, design, and improvement of the interface between a product and a human." Pioneered during World War II to boost factory efficiency and later used by Bell Labs to improve products such as the touch-tone telephone, human factors was...