Email in your pocket
A few friends of mine have a BlackBerry or some other push e-mail device (including the iPhone). Having dinner with them just isn't the same anymore: they're checking their e-mail just as often as I am, when I am working on my laptop (which is way too often). It made me kind of relieved that I don't have push e-mail. Somehow the different modes of reaching me help me in filtering out the urgent messages from the stuff that can wait.

Message Mode = Urgency
> Urgent: call me on my mobile (the people that are important have that number).
> Somewhat urgent: call my office phone (if I'm not there, a colleague will pick up, if it's important, they'll give you my mobile number).
> Somewhat urgent + personal: send me an SMS text message. Usually I'll get back to you pretty quick.
> Not urgent: send me an e-mail. If it's directed to me personally, I'll respond (in time). If I'm in the CC I might ignore it.

"Sent by BlackBerry"
People know that I won't respond to e-mail messages right away. However, if you have a Blackberry, and people know this, they will start expecting you to respond to email during the weekend, or at ten in the evening. It might be me, but I'd rather have the people on the other end of the line do a little thinking (how urgent is this message) and then selecting the mode to reach me. I'm not saying that I won't use e-mail on the iPhone (it's finally coming to the Netherlands), but my messages definetely will not include a line like: "Verstuurd met BlackBerry van KPN" (sent by BlackBerry from KPN). For one, that's advertising and doesn't belong in my emails, and secondly, it disrupts my message mode filterting system: all of a sudden people know I can check my email over the weekend.

Half of the Dutch population owns a mobile phone with advanced functions, but does not use them. According to a study by MextrixLab among more than 500 Dutch people, commissioned by Dutch telecom provider Telfort. The majority of the Dutch claims they do not find it important to be seen with a 'hip' phone. The majority does not use the possibility to send MMS messages, play games, surf or receive e-mail. On the other hand, users are not satisfied about the basic functions they do find important. An empty battery, poor signal reception and settings that are too hard to find turn out to be the most important annoyances.
Keep in mind, the research was commissioned by Telfort, a company that has a 'basic' proposition. So I guess the results coincidentally align nicely with their brand image.

[Through: Nu.nl (in Dutch only)]

UPDATE: Indeed 'marketing-research'
In Dutch newspaper 'De Volkskrant' this morning: Caller gets carried away in megapixel mania (subscribers only, in Dutch only)

That mobile phones are still being sold that you can use to launch a space shuttle, is caused by the competition between mobile phone manufacturers, according to Sander Gielen, Telforts marketing director. [...] Telfort claims to target the so called sim-only subscriptions, where a customer keeps his old mobile, and just buys calling credits.

Interestingly enough, the first phone that a prospective Telfort client runs into on Telforts website is the Samsung G600 (screenshot), that gets praise because of its 5 megapixel camera, bluetooth, mms-capability, e-mail, calendar, and having a voice-memo recorder, stopwatch and mp3-player. "Doesn't seem like your average basic mobile," De Volkskrant remarks.

"Actually it is," says Gielen. "Because this type is one-and-a-half years old. Much more advanced models have hit the market by now. Our portfolio contains relatively many simple mobiles."

So indeed, this study is more about marketing than user research. And I think someone has to explain Gielen the difference between an old and a simple mobile phone. Samsung is not a brand that is renowned for its simplicity and basic feature sets.

Alaska Airlines redesigned their airport check-in to improve the way their customers went through. According to a story entitled Hustle & Flow on FastCompany, the airline studied theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see how they handled similar situations.

Then, the team built mock-ups in a warehouse using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts in order to find ways to increase efficiency. The resulting makeover at the Seattle airport is likely to save almost $8 million a year (and means they won’t have to spend $500 million building a new terminal).

[Through 37signals]

A conversation I overheard on the train:
"So, we want to switch to digital television and we buy this Digitenne set. We install it, and then it turns out that you can only record the TV program that the decoder is set to. Why would I want to record the program I am watching? No one told me about this. I was really mad, had to call customer service and talk to them for a long time."

Better picture quality, more channels, less ease of use
Just an example of how watching television via cable and satellite decoders has given us a broader choice of channels and an increase in picture quality, but reduced the usability of watching TV, if you compare it to a simple coaxial cable. The woman in the train simply expected 'digital television' to work the same way as analogue television. And no-one pointed out to her that digital decoders only emit one channel at a time. That, obviously would reduce her motivation to purchase the product.

The network is the weakest link
Individually the products I use at home to watch television (a decoder, a television, and a home cinema set) are pretty decent when it comes to usability, but if you would look at the usability of the system as a whole, that's even worse than the usability of what used to be the icon of hard to use products: the VCR. I'm hoping for a new generation of televisions with integrated hard disk and tuner. No more hassle please.

The top 8 mistakes in usability testing, on the Good Experience blog:
1. Not conducting any customer research and relying on your best internal guesses.
2. Conducting "pretend" research: "Let's pretend our user's name is Jane and you're 38..."
3. Conducting research, but the wrong type (focus groups instead of individual user tests)
4. Conducting one-on-one research, but with tasks defined beforehand.
5. Not inviting stakeholders to attend research (you know a better way to convince them of the severity of the results?)
6. Not prioritizing findings: "We uncovered 52 usability errors on the site, and here's a list of all of them."
7. Not relating to business objectives: the point of this work is to improve the business.
8. Missing the larger picture: understand the people, the human beings, who make the company possible.
[via Core77]

A recent study by Accenture estimates the costs of consumer electronics returns in 2007 at $13.8 billion in the United States alone, with return rates ranging from 11 percent to 20 percent, depending on the type of product. The distribution of reasons to return the product:
- 68 percent: does not meet customer expectations
- 27 percent: buyer's remorse
- 5 percent: defects or malfunctions
Accenture believes that the return rates for functional products would decline significantly if vendors and retailers invested more in making them easier to set up and use, and in educating buyers. (As the company also designs and implements IT systems, I suppose this is good news for all people that work on a system that was made by Accenture.)

Still no insight in why people are disappointed
The report aligns with, and also quotes the work of Elke den Ouden, although the latter found a higher percentage of products that were malfunctioning (about 50%). Unfortunately both studies do not provide in-depth insights as to why the product's don't meet customer expectations. Was the product too hard to use? Did it lack a certain feature? Didn't it fit the living room? Was the power line too short? (true story, that one...) Basically it can be anything that you thought the product would do, but didn't. And that includes usability. Personally, I would really like to see a breakdown of how many products are returned because people think they're too hard to use, or that they think the products are broken, but they're not (they just were not installed properly). I would say that the reasons that customers give their retailers for returning a product are anything but reliable. All you want to do is return the product, and you'll say anything that will make the retailer do so and not pose annoying questions. And secondly, if a product just disappointed you, how motivated are you to spend time on providing rich and accurate information?

Exact numbers, but no mention of methodology
And what about the methodology of the Accenture study? Den Ouden got her PhD on the subject, which means a publicly available thesis. Not in any mentions of the Accenture study, nor on the Accenture website could I find any mention of how the study was setup. Was it survey based? Was it experts reviews? Was it a literature review? How the hell did they come up with that 68 percent and how can the difference with the work of Den Ouden be explained? One of the downsides of commercial companies doing research and the putting the results out there: very interesting results, and as a researcher I would love to cite them, but I can't, because there was not peer review and you can't find the results anywhere. I'll send them an e-mail, let's see what they say. They've had a good round of free publicity, now we can have a little more information...

UPDATE
Terry Steger's (one of the authors of the report) office was so kind as to send me the report after I had send them an e-mail. The report mentions Accenture's proprietary approach called High Performance Business Research as the method that produced the data. Though it's still not completely clear to me what exactly that is, you can get a bit more background information on this section of Accenture's website.

To support the introduction of its new Harmony Remote Control Logitech has commissioned research firm GfK to study the use of remote controls in the home. The research claims that in a quarter of homes, there is only one person who knows how to operate all the technology. 49 percent of households have five or more remote controls and 87 percent have three or more.

One in four respondents admitted to using cheat sheets, written instructions for their family explaining how to control each system, to circumvent the confusion created by this many controllers. Amazingly, the study also points out that the purchase of a universal remote control - of which Logitech just happens to be introducing a new model - is another popular strategy to cope with the expanding army of remote controls in the home.

After my own run-in with KLM's inflight entertainment system I became a little more sensitized to the subject, and noticed I am not the only one having trouble. Seth Godin points out this glitch in Air Canada's entertainment system:

[It] remembers the volume that the person before you used. Which means that mine was set for 11. Several agonizing seconds later, I was able to rip off the headphones.

Indeed, designing for use by multiple users takes a different set of requirements. This message apparently is lost on Air Canada's execs, who hear about the issue via a reader of Godin's blog but fail to see the point. As the reader reports:

They are still having a debate on this (45 minutes later), deciding if they should put this into the update/rev plan. One guy actually said, "who puts on a headset without check volume first?"

(Photo above: Virgin America's inflight entertainment system 'Red'. Virgin also features what every airline should have: a 110 V power supply in your seat - hurray!)

[Via: Etre]

The Virtual Cable Car navigation system projects a virtual cable, on the inside of your windshield that seems to hang over the road. The projection is in 3D, which allows you to glance ahead to see where you should drive, instead of getting verbal and visual pointers on how to drive, such as on more conventional car navigation systems. According its conceiver, with this system drivers only user peripheral vision to navigate, causing it to be safer.
[via Infosthetics]