An article in New Media Age says that “only one in 20 business people understand the difference between Wi-Fi, 3G and GPRS technologies” according to some new study. I’m stuck trying to figure out why that’s important. It’s an indictment of carriers’ marketing and service failures more than a sign of user ignorance.
There’s no reason an average user should have to, or be expected to, navigate all these acronyms and technical terms, either in marketing or as part of the user experience. The marketing part is pretty easy — quit selling technology and start selling services (ie picture messaging, not MMS and the Internet, not GPRS). Perhaps the user experience is a little trickier, but I’d venture that the only time a normal user would run into these terms would be when something goes wrong and they’ve got to fix (or try to fix) something. While maybe that’s not preventable, it could be handled better.
WAP, 3G, GPRS, MMS — these are all meaningless terms. What concerns a user is what their phone can do, rather than how it does it. Do they care if it’s 2G versus 3G? The likely response is “what’s a G?”
It’s one of Russell’s favorite rants to decry (and rightly so) the fiasco of getting handsets set up properly for MMS, so I won’t cover that ground again. But the point is still valid: a customer shouldn’t have to do this stuff, or have any technical knowledge to make this stuff work.
Is it too much to ask for users to be able to walk into a shop, go “I want that one” and walk out with a phone that can properly access the services they’re interested in and can clearly understand, at an easily digested tariff?
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