Ease of use is one those pesky things that a lot of engineers miss when designing new hardware. The fact is, most consumers dont have the patience or inclination to figure out your newest gizmo. Companies just dont have much time to communicate value to busy consumers.
One aspect of ease of use is discoverability, or how easy it is to find things you want or dont even know you want, and it continues to be a huge issue for tech products. Whether it is how to show 300 inventory items in a webpage or how to show all the features of the latest "smart" phone. Discoverability of features through the user interface is both difficult and critical and it is a problem that only increases as devices get smaller and pile on more and more functions.
Buried Treasure
Cellphone companies have spent billions cramming content onto their networks. Now they want to help their customers find it.
Wall Street Journal
September 11, 2006
Cellphone companies are loading their handsets with all sorts of multimedia offerings. Now comes the tough part: making it easy for consumers to find what they're looking for.
There is no shortage of companies trying to address the problem. Mobile-specific search engines are sprouting up to help users find that one Madonna ring tone or Yankees-Red Sox score. Speech-recognition technologies are making their way into the wireless world, both for search and to make it easier to navigate through cellphone menus quickly. And handset manufacturers and carriers are rethinking the software interfaces they build to reduce the number of clicks people are forced to make.
For wireless operators, the stakes are huge. Carriers like Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless -- a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC -- have spent billions rolling out high-speed networks capable of delivering ring tones, music downloads, wallpaper and other content to their customers. But those bells and whistles won't mean much if consumers continue to have to click through several menus on their phones, type in URLs in clunky fashion, or send short text messages requesting content from mobile media providers.
"Things can be buried in menus, hard to find, hard to use -- it's one of our big challenges," says Jim Ryan, vice president of consumer data services for Cingular, a joint venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp.
