After my baby daughter was born last month and we knew Mom and the little girl were okay and cleaned up, it was time to announce our new bundle of joy’s arrival to our friends and family. Since we had been at the hospital for about 12 hours, my iPhone’s battery was exhausted and I needed to use my wife’s new phone to send out a brief text message and photo of the baby.
Perhaps I’m so used to the iPhone (and previously the Palm Treo) that I’m now incapable of using a non-QWERTY keyboard, but I could not understand how on Earth to take a photo, text a brief message, and send to multiple phone numbers. Finally I bailed on typing any message and just sent a photo of the newborn, bewildering quite a few of my friends and family (“Is this the baby?” “Is it a girl? Boy?” “Is everything okay?”–you get the idea).
A few days later I saw the CTIA’s promotional television commercial when the voice-over continually says “You wanted more of this” and “You wanted more of that”, followed by a simple, reassuring “OK”.
Usually if I heard such a shameless promotion for scope bloat, my thoughts would fill of business analysts dreaming up new features that no one will use and engineers developing new capabilities for software simply because they could make the code work.
Instead, I realized all I wanted was an intuitive device built on convention, common sense, natural mappings found elsewhere, and simple affordance clues (when not using my iPhone).
Apparently, I’m not alone.
The BBC just reported that “the complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry…” in the January 19th article New Phone Features ‘Baffle Users’.
The article almost speaks directly against the CTIA’s promotional message:
“There is an enormous range of things modern phones are capable of doing but the paradox is that many people are not using these capabilities,” [mobile device research firm Mformation spokesman Matthew Bancroft] said.
Of those questioned, 95% said they would be more likely to use new features if the initial set-up were easier.
Mr Bancroft said bad experiences turned people off trying to get more from their phone.
“If an application does not work once or twice, they just will not use it or try again,” he said.
Though almost edict by now, building something simply because you can doesn’t automatically make it a desirable feature for your users, no matter the production quality of the commercial that tries to convince me otherwise. OK?
