I don't need a top-of-the-line smartphone, but when the opportunity came to cut cellphone costs in half, my wife and I switched to a new company and got new phones as part of the deal. The transfer of old phone numbers to the new phones required only a phone call and about three minutes. Smooth and easy.
Then came the task of moving contact lists from one phone to another. That became a long, frustrating process.
Simply switching SIM cards didn't do the job, although the phone supplier recommends that approach. I won't go through the many, many steps that took about three hours to figure out. Contacts got moved one at a time to a folder the new phone could finally read and download. Then moving the contacts from the downloaded file involved several operations for each contact. This process should have taken about five minutes.
Surprisingly, Samsung manufactured both the new and old phones, so I lost a lot of respect for the company's user interface designers. Whoever wrote the phone's manual deserves to listen to customer complaints.
I'd bet the underlying software works well, but the user interface lacks an intuitive flow that would make it easy to create a Bluetooth connection and transfer information back and forth with other devices. Perhaps the user interface never got a thorough test by potential customers. The designers could have made the user "experience" simpler and easier to understand.
Samsung isn't alone in the design of poor user interfaces. A government Website I recently tried to use required entry of a lot of information. The bottom of the screen placed a "cancel" button in the middle and a "continue" button off to the side. I instinctively clicked the cancel button and had to start over. Why not color the cancel button red, and the continue button green, and place them in the center of the screen? The cancel button could pop up an "Are you sure?" message and let people click yes or no.
An automatic billing email I receive monthly used to include a large "sign in" logo that did nothing. Instead, the page designer required people to click on a "sign in" legend in small type. Thankfully, people can now click on the logo.
I agree, Beth. Companies try hard to get a product on store shelves as quickly as possible and might "update" an older user interface to force fit it to a new product in the interest of saving time. My story about the Samsung phone gets sadder by the day. Instead of trying the exasperating Bluetooth connection with my old phone I decided to enter my important contacts in the phone's directory manually. The phone has fields for First Name (Joe) and Last Name (Smith), and it combines these fields to display the name "Joe Smith" in the directory. Apparently the search "feature" looks only at the first name because a search for "Sm" cannot find "Joe Smith" in the directory. The software lacks the capability to list last names first. The user should have that choice, or the software should find a string of characters anywhere in name fields.
I admit some other search capability might exist, but if so, the user interface has it well hidden, as does the phone's instruction booklet.
Cell phones especially, go through rapid version changes. The 2-year contract that is normal with phones will likely put you three or four firmware versions behind by the time you get to upgrade again. The user interface has to change with the firmware (or else how will we dumb users know that something changed). The rapid pace means kludgy interfaces.
I'd really, really like to see that rate of change slow down, but that industry doesn't agree with me.
Jon, I think you have hit on one of the biggest issues and challenges today for companies producing products, even if they don't identify with the label of software developer. The cream of the crop of today's consumer devices have gotten consumers very used to a streamlined, intuitive user experience where they can nearly effortlessly navigate the device and be up and running in fairly short order.
I'll conceed there are still exceptions--much like your phone experience. But increasingly, that is not the norm and the expectation from consumers is that they should be able to go from zero to 60 on a device without a lot of handholding and definitely without having to read arcane technical documentation. Case in point: I can generally hand my tween-agers an app or a Web site that has me confounded and they can zero in on the proper navigation and cut to the chase in fairly short order.
The whole trend around consumer devices setting the expectation stage for the user experience for both business and personal products is not going away. Companies are going to have to step up to the plate if they want happy and engaged customers.
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