User error seems to be something of a theme here this week, with loads of comments on my What a Waste post about the ineffectiveness of Wap Push. The consensus seems to be that at least part of the problem is the user not knowing how to respond to a message or being unable to find it when it does arrive.
So it’s interesting to read about a new survey that suggests that of the one in seven phones returned by users as faulty, 63% have nothing wrong with them whatsoever. Let’s not forget, these devices aren’t something that have been rushed out in someone’s lunch hour, but something that incredibly intelligent and dedicated teams have spent many hours and much money designing, creating and honing and (you’d hope) running exhaustive usability tests on them.
[Mind you, you'd have thought that would also apply to Ikea flat-pack furniture, but I'd be surprised if they even know what usability testing was. Sorry, personal gripe!]
But returning to the non-faulty phones, this is really an awful track record, costing the mobile industry about £4.5 billion a year globally, based on the cost of £35 to test, repair and refurbish a phone.
Actually, this doesn’t surprise me all that much. I remember being involved peripherally in a similar issue with Sony’s PlayStation when it was first launched. Many returns were simply not required and it was costing a fortune. So, we set up a call centre, where the first few questions would determine if it was the machine or the user that was dodgy - a kind of drongo testing exercise. Then if we thought it was a genuine case, we’d turn up the next day with a new one. As well as being outstanding customer service, this was actually cheaper than the previous collect, repair and return, as we could collect the old one at the same time as delivering a refurbished one.
But the point is that PlayStations were far easier to use than today’s phones and the users were much more techically literate than the average phone user.
As far as the mobile industry is concerned, this depressing scenario simply has to be improved. The company that emerges with a better usability testing solution, as well as a logistics concept more like I’ve described above, stands to make a great deal of money.
But, equally important is the education of the users themselves. You can try to design your phone to be foolproof, but we always underestimate the ingenuity of fools and they’ll find a way to misunderstand, no matter how brilliant your design.
Clearly, many approaches to education have been tried with technology - ranging from manuals, which few ever read, to product and feature “tours” which people promptly forget about, even if they see it in the first place. Most of us are much more interested in a Ready, Fire, Aim approach when it comes to using tech.
This isn’t an old problem though. I heard from a Microsoft insider that 70% of Excel users don’t know you can use it to add up columns and rows of figures. Yes, I was surprised by this too - but try it for yourself, it can 
Despite this huge issue of most users never utilising anything but a tiny fraction of the technology they have available, most vendors pay lip service to user education, believing that, for instance, training is the responsibility of training companies. And writing such bad product manuals that other independent companies could write and sell millions of manuals that simply did a much better job.
In this case, it’s not an opportunity cost (users not getting full value from purchases and therefore failing to appreciate them) but a £4.5 billion direct cost a year, not counting customer disappointment, which surely calls for a new approach.
SNAP in, that I wrote about after 3GSM, have at least part of the answer and if you’re an operator and not talking to them, I urge you to call them now and at least see what they’re up to. You’ll be left behind if you don’t do something like this, I promise you.
But, I’d also consider testing the idea of free seminars about getting the most out of your mobile phone. I have a feeling that these would be surprisingly popular as most people seem to want to learn, they just don’t know where to start and the self-help method evidently doesn’t work for 95% of the population. I think Orange’s new initiative of incentivising retail sales people to get their customers to use data is a great too, partly as it can be directly measured and partly as it turns an influential and under-utilised army of form-fillers into evangelists.
As a final plea to the industry in a week where we’ve covered two huge stories with usability at their core. The mobile user is not you. To quote David Ogilvy, slightly out of context, the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife. Or husband, or anyone else you know who doesn’t work in mobile and who thinks about their phones’ features as often as they think about how a vacuum cleaner actually works.
Handset manufacturers certainly need to lead this charge, but operators surely need to up their game too, with both sides starting by committing to a zero tolerance of phones that don’t work properly, out of the box.
But it doesn’t end there. This matter is a critical issue for the mobile industry and lies at the heart of the question of whether mobile data will really take off and become the cavalry charging over the hill to save the army beleaugured by falling voice revenues and margins.
Maybe this could be a great role for the Mobile Data Association in the UK, at least, which always seems to me to have a huge potential role in the value chain, but lies there like some slumbering giant.
[tags] usability, snap in, excel, Ogilvy, MDA, mobile data [/tags]
Thanks for the read. I have a few questions. Do you think uniformity and standards in mobile will help resolve the situation? Do you think it would help if manufacturers has consistency with product navigation from the cheapie prepaid models all the way up to the most expensive release? Do you think that with the push for “smart” phones that this will become an even greater problem?
I know it is a lot of questions but I am hoping you are open to them.
- BigBerries
Good post. I think this is a hugely important problem. And as smartphones are becoming ever more complicated, it might get even worse.
Two days ago, I read similar thoughts - though from a different perspective from Pip Coburn’s article “Non-Geeks are Not Morons: The Change Function Model for Adopting Technology”.
http://www.changethis.com/pdf/24.02.NonGeeks
Quote:
“Maybe folks find your product hard to learn. Moments ago I received an email from a friend describing a study that showed half of all returned electronics products in the U.S. that
were claimed to be faulty actually worked but users tend to give up figuring them out in 20 minutes! Think maybe those fat user manuals or long call lines listening to Barry Manilow is
enough to scar them forever?”
We’ve been talking to a number of people about how to deal with this sort of issue.Imagine if the operator (or the handset manufacturer?) sent owners of new handsets a mms each day with a couple of did you know tips. Supported by a website where people can share their tips on how to get the best out of a phone. And/or have the handset pre loaded with content on how to get the most from the phone - video or even a mobizine
This approach would increase satisfaction, get people using more of their phones capabilities and may even kickstart MMS
BigBerries - Uniform standards might be the best idea in the history of the universe, but it’s not going to happen, so there’s little point in speculation. Consistency in models isn’t really practical. Different phones do different things and have different features, so a flexible approach is required. They’re also getting better at navigation all the time, so they need the flexibility to adapt. And yes, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Simon - I’m pleased someone thinks that mms can be kickstarted
Having said that, while usability is an issue for MMS, when I’m Marketing Director for the Day of MMS, my main priorities would be pricing (decrease and transparency - and a fixed price data plan), consistency of delivery (a message sent must be a message delivered) and then usability, but more in terms of making it template driven and easy to use, not so much HOW to use it.
I’m also not convinced that this incremental improvement is what’s needed to improve usability - incrementalism is the enemy of innovation, after all. A really radical approach is needed here. I’m not sure I have the answer, but then, hell, no one is paying me to focus on what it might be!
I think a start would be for the Board of the handset manufacturers to have a new position - Champion of Customer Service, Usability and Product Experience. It’s the most important function in the company, but one that frequently gets overlooked and key issues drop through the cracks.
MobHappy on: Never Underestimate the Ingenuity of Fools…
I had a boss who would always said to me that one never can never underestimate the ways someone can screw something up (he meant scientists in the lab) - one of his many great managerial suggestions. So, it is…
I started writing a very long note about why this is so, as I’ve worked as a product manager and CTO at an embedded mobile application ISV, but I concluded the reasons behind it don’t really matter, as attitude changes need to be made fresh. Digging into all the “dirty laundry” probably doesn’t help anyone. It’s better to wash it.
Part of my responsibilities was to get a common look-n-feel for all products provided by the ISV, and for that we wrote an extensive UI Guideline and acted inhouse “UI police” (via usability testing etc) to get what we wanted. Note though that this was for our own applications only. Getting this right for a complete phone was outside our jurisdiction, but a similar approach is needed also at operators and manufacturers. Some are of course better than others at this.
Comments on MMS in Sweden:
E.g. 3 Sweden charges 0 SEK for SMS and MMS sent to other 3 users (in certain plans). That’s cheap enough to me :). Even when sending to others it’s humane: 10 cents for SMS and 20 cents for MMS. Not all operators have this attractive pricing though, but they feel the pressure.
A secondary driver for more MMSs is in my opinion blogging and social network services, as SMS is still sufficient for most user-to-user messaging, but as both SMS and MMS are inexpensive in Sweden I believe more will send photos etc to others as well.
Great article! I’d be willing to bet that many of the phones reported as faulty were reported as such, just because the owner had to give a reason for the return. In many of the cases, the phone was probably just so hard to use that the owner finally gave up on the thing.
Usability is a huge problem with almost every electronic device on the market right now. The more these devices become mainstream appliances (and not just the toys of techno-philes) the more these usability issues will hurt the companies that makes them.