How many telephone rings would you allow before you want something else to happen?

I was thinking about telephone rings and how that applies to differant contextes with businesses and personal relationships. Watching family, friends and business people make phone calls i notice the frustation levels and the willingness to allow more or less rings seems to correlate with the intent and context of the conversation.

When I was modifying my business phone menu system for incoming calls, I used the stop watch on my ipod touch to see how many telephone rings i could receive during 5 seconds before it trasferred into the tree directory. You could receive just short of 4 calls, about 1 seconds more and it would be a solid 4 calls. So I set it at 3 seconds and thought about, why do people call me on my business phone? email address? fax number? company name? website address? I would say yes to all but intent and context have more variables to consider.

What i often do for brainstorming sessions when i am sitting at my desk is open mindJet mind manager and starting exploring and expanding ideas. As the central theme i type in: How many telephone rings would you allow before you want something else to happen? As topics I put intent and context, then placed constraints as a subtopic.

This mind map helps me while i am running scenarios in my head or sketching them out. How do these scenarios match with the current system?  For this question I usually sketch a flow/ task analysis, then if possible actually perform these task with these scenarios.

The end result was:

I set the phone to 6 seconds before the phone directory starts based on the results i discovered peforming differant scenarios.