One of the big issues facing technologists is that most people don’t use most of the inbuilt features, most of the time. As an example, the vast majority of mobile owners, tend to restrict their network use to simple voice and sms (and a few non-network apps like the clock and calculator). Similarly, 70% of MS Excel users don’t know that the application can add up columns and rows automatically – they just use it to line the figures up prettily and still use a calculator.

However, getting people to use all or most of the tools at their disposal is actually a vital issue;

- How can you persuade people that they need to upgrade, when they’re not getting much more than 10% of the potential usage out of their current purchase?

- How can you expect any degree of loyalty towards your brand, when people don’t know how to use it properly?

- One of the ways technology gets adopted is peer recommendation. If your early adopters can’t “sell” your product properly to the next level of potential customers, you’ll find it really tough to get traction.

- In a mobile context, there’s another big issue. If people don’t know about a feature or how to use it, they’re not going to create lots of profitable network traffic for the operators. MMS is a great example.

Despite its importance though, this area is often ignored by technologists, other than to subscribe to the theory (rarely mentioned aloud) that most of their customers must be pretty dim if they can’t work it out for themselves or read the bloody product manual that’s so thoughtfully included.

Whereas the real problem is that there’s no such thing as a stupid customer, just bad design and bad product manuals. I won’t start on manuals today, apart from to say isn’t it sad that a whole multi-million dollar industry exists to publish better product instructions than the product makers themselves can be bothered to write and print? Can you imagine buying a new car and having to buy a book called Saab 2005 For Dummies? Err, actually, I might have hit on something there!

So, it was nice to read about Samsung’s new Scandinavian campaign, reported by Martina at Adverblog. Purchasers of the D600 handset are invited to participate into, what looks like, quite a compelling interactive game and successfully complete 5 tasks. Each task in cunningly designed to also demonstrate how to use different features of the phones.

And of course, the game is also something cool that owners can use to show off their new toy to their mates in the pub with. This isn’t a flippant comment at all. More mobile phones are “sold” in the pub and other social situations, than in all the mobile phone showrooms combined.

So well done to this week’s Clever Clogs, Samsung for taking user-centric design to the next level. We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing as technologists realise that they’re damaging their businesses badly by ignoring post-purchase product feature sampling. Maybe we’ll start seeing a radical rethink on manuals too – about time, if you ask me.