Consumers may return products because they consider them too complex (picture taken from The Cristian Science Monitor website)

The Christian Science Monitor has a good overview-article on the increasing complexity of electronic consumer products and the consequences for product returns: a fast rate of return. What I find particularly interesting is the role of the retailers. On the one hand the article points out that if consumer electronics are too hard to understand, the retailers are caught in the middle between their customers and their suppliers, with an estimated cost of product returns of about $100 billion per year.
On the other hand - contrary to popular belief - it's not just the engineers who keep pouring more and more features into products, it's the sales people as well: more buttons means more features means more sales arguments. So here we have retailers complaining that products become too complex, while on the other hand their only sales strategy is selling products based on features. Ever heard a sales person in a store telling you that: "Well, this products has not as many features, and costs a little bit more, but it is really easy to use, so in the end it brings you more value for money." Consumer electronics retailers should revisit their sales training to be able to sell easy-to-use products to the general public. And consumer electronics manufacturers should develop a marketing strategy to support that sales strategy.

Another interesting issue in the article is that, as many articles before, it quotes a study performed by Elke den Ouden, that pointed out that from a technical point of view there is nothing wrong with a large part of products that are returned by the customers.

Half the products returned to stores are in good working order, but customers can't figure out how they work, says a recent study conducted at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

It's tempting for me to go along with the notion that half of the product returns is due to a lack of usability, but to put it bluntly, the authors of this article make the same mistake as so many authors before. Den Ouden pointed out that almost half of the product returns was not due to any technical malfunction of the product. It did NOT say that all of these non-technical faults were due to usability issues. If you read her thesis, you'll see that the non-technical faults might have a number of other causes, such as too high expectations by the clients ("There is no music on this mp3 player..."). Nevertheless, Den Ouden does indicate that a considerable portion of product returns might be due poor usability (or product complexity, that depends on how you put it), the question is how big that portion is.