I really like the way that the iPhone recognises phone numbers in emails and turns them into touchable links.

But for ages I thought that all you could do was call the number.

This used to really annoy me because, being a modern kind of person, I generally prefer to text people than call them. Other times I just wanted the number to add to my address book, so I’d end up cutting and pasting the number into Contacts.

Then one day I lingered on the link too long and a whole new menu popped up! Hey, here were exactly the features I was looking for.

Now, there are two problems here.

Firstly, there is no advantage to the user from this arrangement. In both cases the phone displays a menu with one or more actions and an option to cancel it. The required user actions are the same:

1. Press (or press and hold)
2. Press selected option or cancel

If the user interaction is exactly the same why not just show the full menu in both cases?

Secondly, and more importantly, this “press and hold” functionality is hidden from the user and there’s no way to easily discover it. I’d had my phone for a couple of years before I realised it was there (I’m assuming it wasn’t added in an OS upgrade) and I wonder how many people still don’t know about it. And what other convenient features am I missing just because I haven’t thought to check that they might be there?

To my mind, “press and hold” is a user-unfriendly way to add functionality and should be avoided wherever possible.

Last week I went to my first Select Committee hearing and therefore I’m now an expert. Here’s what I found out.

Why

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties sent in a submission about the Electoral (Disqualification of Convicted Prisoners) Amendment Bill to the Law and Order Select Comittee.

Current law says that prisoners given a sentence of longer than 3 years cannot vote; this bill extends that to all prisoners. The Council opposes this change and recommends that this provision should be removed from the law, not extended.

In our submission we asked to make an oral submission to the committee.

Subsequently we received an invitation to appear before them. We were allocated 10 minutes to make our submission. Kevin was to do the submission while I went to support him.

Where

We turned up at Parliament 20 minutes before our time and went through the main visitor entrance. The receptionist asked us our business, gave us a sticker and then pointed us in the direction of the hearing rooms. The door was closed and a sign said that it was closed to the public. We sat down and chatted to the other submitters.

How

Eventually (they were late) the committee finished what they were doing, a whole bunch of people in suits filed out, and the sign on the door was changed to show that it was open to the public. We all filed in and sat in the public seats at one end of the room.

At the other end was a large U-shaped table with the various MPs around it, each with a computer terminal and a sign with their name in front of them.

What

The proceedings of the committee were fairly relaxed. The chair of the committee invited us up, quickly did introductions around the table and then asked us to speak.

Kevin gave his presentation and then the committee asked questions. The questions were generally quite good and showed that the committee members had listened to what he was saying – although some were obviously using our submission as a launch pad to put forward their own points of view. One committee member even asked for a copy of the statistics we had included in the presentation and then raced off to take copies.

Then the questions stopped and it was time for the next submitter to make their presentation, so we made our way out.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kevin McCormack of the NZ Council for Civil Liberties who wrote the original submission and then prepared and presented the oral submission.