I’ve been saying for years that ease-of-use is critical to the future of mobility, if not consumer electronics overall. I spend a lot of time testing (and using) technology products of many forms and I often marvel at just how bad the user interfaces of so many products are. I was setting up a new receiver in our Wireless Media Facility over the holidays, and everything from the front-panel layout to the embedded software setup was (and remains) illogical and difficult. Who designs this stuff? Microsoft? What are they thinking? UIs, BTW, absolutely should never be designed by the engineers who build them. Ask a customer instead; they’ll tell you what will make them happy.
Now comes a survey sponsored by mobile-device management supplier Mformation that indicates many users are indeed unhappy – it “shows 95% of consumers surveyed would be more likely to try new mobile phone services if the set-up were easier.” The quote is from the Wireless Week article (link above in this paragraph). Want more? “Set-up issues also prevented 45% of people from upgrading to new, more sophisticated phones, and 61% said phone set-up is as frustrating as changing a bank account.” OK, that’s enough, but check the rest of the article. Bottom line: both the handset vendors and the carriers are losing business because their products are too hard to use.
The solution is simple in concept, but difficult in practice. There’s no single UI that will make everyone happy, and always tradeoffs relating to new users vs. those same people as they get more experienced (as well as pros and 16-year-olds who can figure out how something works just by touching it), and support costs, including training salespeople. I like soft, customizable UIs, but the support expense associated with these can be enormous. But the whole industry is falling down on the job here, and getting our act together WRT ease of use will be critical to growth in the future.
I did, BTW, finally settle on the Samsung Omnia for my next platform phone, and, yes, I’m still learning how to use it. Sigh.
