Soapbox

I bought a Nokia 6682 phone a couple of weeks ago, as an upgrade for my Nokia 6230. Actually, I have my parents signed up on my service plan, and I was planning on sending them the 6230 to replace an older phone they lost, and taking advantage of this as an excuse to upgrade… The 6682 is a Symbian “smartphone” sporting Nokia’s Series 60 UI, and I was influenced by rave reviews like Russell Beattie’s. In recent years, Nokia has been churning out phones with crackpot designs and dubious usability for coolness’ sake. There must have been a customer backlash, as their recent phones like the 6682 have a much more reasonable, reassuringly boring but functional design. Another reason is that Apple’s iSync only works with Nokia’s Series 60 phones, and it will sync photos from the OS X address book.

I returned the phone for a refund last Friday, because the ergonomics are simply atrocious, and from a usability point of view it was actually an unacceptable downgrade from the Series 40 (non-Symbian) Nokia 6230. The low-res 176×208 screen has significantly lower information density than the 320×480 or 640×480 screens now standard on most PDAs, and makes web browsing almost useless. The only thing it has going for it is a semi-decent camera.

Even basic functionality like the address book is poorly implemented. When you scroll down your contacts list, you can select one to decide whether you want to reach them on their home or mobile number. The problem is, the next time you want to make a call and access the address book, you do not start afresh, but still in the list of contacts for the previous contact, making you back out. Let’s not even mention the ridiculously complex key sequence required to record a voice memo.

I have to contrast this with my Palm Tungsten T3, in my book still the best PDA ever (specially compared to the underwhelming, plasticky T5 or the boat-anchor and RAM-starved Lifedrive). Recording a voice memo merely requires pressing and holding a dedicated button, something that can be done one-handed by touch alone. Palm’s address book quick look up scrolling algorithm is a model of efficiency yet to be matched on any phone I have ever used. PalmOS might be getting long in the tooth, specially as regards multitasking, and its future is cloudy, but it still has a serious edge in usability. This is not by accident — Palm paid as much attention to the user interface as Apple did in its day, as this anecdote by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue illustrates:

I once visited Palm Computing in its heyday. One guy I met there introduced himself as tap counter. It was his job to make sure that no task on the PalmPilot required more than three taps of the stylus on the screen. More than three steps, and the feature had to be redesigned. Electronics should save time, not waste it.

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by the 6682’s poor ergonomics, they were readily apparent from day one. The device is neither a good phone, nor an even halfway acceptable PDA. I decided to give it a chance, thinking it could just be a question of settling into an unfamiliar user interface. I did not have as long an adaptation period when moving from my old T68i to the 6230, and after two weeks my dim initial opinion of the Series 60 had if anything deteriorated further. Russell Beattie can dish it, but he can’t take it. In hindsight, Beattie’s defensiveness about smart people preferring dumb phones over jack-of-all-trades devices was not a good sign.

Pundits have been predicting the demise of the PDA at the hands of the smartphone for many years. Phones certainly outsell PDAs by a handy margin, but a small minority of them are smartphones, and I suspect most people get them for the improved cameras and disregard the unusable advanced functionality. I tend to agree with this old but still valid assessment — the best option is to have a decent PDA in hand, connected to the cell phone in your pocket via Bluetooth.

I suspect the smartphones’ ergonomic shortcomings are structural, not just due to lack of usability skills on the manufacturers’ part. Nokia knows how to design good user interfaces, like Navi or Series 40, but the situation with Series 60 is not going to be rectified anytime soon. The reason for this is that most people buy their cell phones with a subsidy that is paid back over the duration of a 1 or 2 year minimum duration contract. This control over distribution allows the mobile operators ultimate say over the feature set. This is most visible in branding elements like Cingular’s “Media store” icon that flogs overpriced garbage like downloadable ring tones.

To add injury to insult, deleting those “features” is disabled, so they keep hogging scarce memory and screen real estate. Carriers also disable features that would allow people to use their phones without being nickel-and-dimed for expensive intelligent network services like MMS, like some Bluetooth functionality or the ability to send photos over email rather than MMS. It is highly likely carriers will fight tooth-and-nail against the logical inclusion of WiFi and VoIP in future handsets. This conflict of interest between carriers and users won’t be resolved until regulators compel them to discontinue what is in effect a forced bundling practice.

Mobile carriers, like their Telco forebears, seem to believe if they piss on something, it improves the flavor… This is also the reason why I think mobile operator cluelessness about mobile data services is terminal — they keep pushing their failed walled-garden model of WAP services using phones, and gouge for the privilege of using a PDA or laptop to access the real Internet via Bluetooth, while at the same time not deigning to provide any support. WiFi may not be an ideal technology, specially in terms of ubiquity, but as long as carriers make us unwashed users jump through hoops to be allowed access to their data networks, low-hassle WiFi access using a PDA will be the superior, if intermittent alternative to a data-enabled phone. As for the aborted phone upgrade, I guess I will just wait for the Nokia 6270 to hit these blighted shores.

Eighty percent of success is showing up. — Woody Allen

My company, Kefta, helps its clients, usually Fortune 500 companies with e-commerce operations, improve their online conversion rates. We typically increase sales by 10–20%. This is not rocket science, more akin to Retail 101, simple things like modifying pages to stop showing offers for products we know the user has already purchased, or making offers more relevant when we know the prospect is interested in a specific product (e.g. because they come from Google after searching for that keyword).

Sometimes I wonder if what we are doing is not too sophisticated by far, when I see particularly boneheaded practices at places that really should know better. Dell is often touted as a model of logistical and operational excellence, and for being a web-centric company. My experience is that many products they carry are not listed on the web site and can only be ordered by phone. You also have to phone to get a discount.

Despite being a telecoms engineer by training, I loathe phones. Phones are great for keeping an emotional connection with friends and family, but are a staggeringly inefficient form of communication for business purposes. They do not leave an audit trail, and even when they do (my voice mail system automatically forwards them to me by email as a MIME-encoded WAV attachment), they hog disk space and are not searchable. You can scan an email in a few seconds, but are forced to listen to voice mail at whatever pace it was dictated. Well, at least with WAV attachments, I can skip back to write down a phone number without having to replay the whole message.

Coming back to Dell, I recently needed to buy a Gigabit Ethernet switch from them. I sent an email to my rep, which he promptly ignored. I tried calling, at least 4 or 5 times, but my only option was voice-mail jail. In the end, I passed the buck to a junior colleague, who tried to leave voice mail and discovered he couldn’t because it was full. With persistence, he managed to get Dell to condescend to taking our order. No customer should have to go through so many hoops just so the vendor can take their money.

I am ragging on Dell, but most IT vendors do as poorly. I can understand expensive support calls receiving lower priority and resources than sales calls — after all, the company already has your money. Not having their act together for the simple matter of order-taking simply boggles the mind. Workflow systems, automatic call distributors and other technologies designed to prevent this have been available for many years. It looks like nobody has bothered to go through the user experience, even though these bugs (and many other glaring deficiencies like session timeouts) could be caught by the most cursory of inspections.

Dell sends an automated satisfaction survey after a sale. Unlike the order-taking process, the survey follows up if you do not respond… That said, it is the usual worthless multiple-choice question format asking me to answer irrelevant questions on a scale of 1 to 10. I don’t recall if the form had a box for free-form comments, but even if it did, the survey design is not-so-subtly signaling that no human is ever going to read what you type there, and thus it is not worth the effort to fill it. The numeric answers are probably going to be collated by an automated report nobody pays any attention to anymore, because garbage-in, garbage-out.

If you are serious about customer feedback, make it open and free-form, and make sure each and every feedback is read by a human (they come quite cheap in the Midwest and the developing world). They should be acknowledged personally (not with an automated reply) and followed through until the issue is either resolved or a decision is taken not to implement the changes suggested (because they are too expensive, impractical or whatever other reason). In both cases, inform the user who bothered to give feedback — most large companies pay a fortune in market research while at the same time ignoring the free (and usually very valuable) insights submitted by their customers. Granted, you cannot always resolve every complaint by unreasonable customers, but feedback on process issues should always be taken into consideration.

Sometimes dropped orders are due to active incompetence rather than careless neglect. While implementing a campaign for one of our clients, we realized there was a bug in one of their ordering forms that would cause them to drop an order. Our software sits on top of the client’s website and monitors it precisely for exception cases like these, and we told them we could, at no extra charge for them, send the dropped order details to an email address of their choosing so the order could be re-entered manually. They declined our offer for various reasons related to internal politics and trade union issues, essentially they were refusing to bend down and pick up money lying on the floor (our estimate was they were losing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of customer lifetime value every month due to inaction).

You don’t have to endure a multi-million dollar ERP or CRM implementation to improve follow-through. Where there is a will, there is a way, and a little creative thinking will usually find a work-around that can get the job done until a more robust solution can be deployed. One of our clients, a major bank, was in the early stages of developing their e-commerce, and simultaneously in the throes of a Siebel implementation. Their online forms would simply send an email to a branch office for manual processing. We were implementing a satisfaction survey for them, and offered to send an email automatically to a supervisor if the customer’s order had not been processed, at least until Siebel came on-line. Poor man’s workflow, but email workflows are often quite effective, specially for remedial situations like these.

As I mentioned, sometimes I think I am in the wrong business, and should instead start a consultancy to teach some clue to large companies that have grown complacent. But then again, that is assuming somebody cares, beyond paying lip service to Customer Relationship Management. There is no point in setting up complex systems to build a lifelong relationship with repeat customers if you can’t even take their orders in the first place.

When I first heard Microsoft chose “Vista” as the official name for the much-delayed Longhorn release of Windows, I immediately thought of this (Quicktime, 657KB). Does this mean I am a bad person?

France is the most generous donor in the G-8, contributing 0.42 percent of national income, followed by Britain at 0.34 percent, Germany at 0.28 percent and Canada at 0.26 percent. France has said it will meet the 0.7 percent goal by 2012 and the U.K. by 2013.
Oxfam quoted by Bloomberg

The unfolding Indian Ocean tsunami disaster is a great opportunity to set this right. You can donate to Doctors without Borders as I have, or to one of the many other relief agencies working to bring aid to the displaced survivors and stave off the spread of disease. When I was younger and shopping around for English dictionaries, my litmus test for a good dictionary was whether it included the word “tsunami”. Now I wish it had not reached this sudden notoriety…

King Gillette is famous for his invention of the disposable-blade razor, and the associated business model, “give away the razor, sell the blades”. This strategy was widely imitated, but it seems marketers have struck an even better one: why give away the razor when you can make the chumps pay for it?

There are a number of products, some high-tech and some not where you actually pay handsomely for a device that is a doorstop without proprietary refills or service. Some examples:

• In the US, most cell phones are either hard-wired to a specific service provider (CDMA) or SIM-locked (GSM). A consumers’ group is fighting in court to ban or at least limit in time the practice, which is either outlawed or strictly regulated in most other countries.

  Sure, the carrier is subsidizing the handset, but that is offset by extra profit margins in the contract. Once the contract’s minimum term is over, there is no justification whatsoever for maintaining the SIM lock. AT&T was one of the most egregious offenders, it is not clear if their policy will change after their takeover by Cingular.

  I suspect one of the big reasons for SIM lock is so carriers can charge extortionate international roaming charges, since without SIM lock, it would be cheaper to just pop in a prepaid SIM card in the country you are visiting. Actually, roaming charges are so overpriced that it is cheaper to just buy a new phone for the prepaid card and toss it away afterwards.

  There are real externality costs to society due to distortions in consumer behavior from carrier policies. Many people throw away their old cell phones when they change service or renew a contract, as the subsidy is only applicable towards a new phone purchase, never granted as a rebate to people opting to keep their older but perfectly serviceable phone. In California alone, 44,650 cell phones are discarded each day, usually ending up in landfill, at tremendous cost to the environment.

• MP3.com founder Michael Robertson is suing Vonage for trying to extend the same despicable lock-in model to VoIP, with what he claims is deceptive advertising. Most commentators have rushed to Vonage’s defense — apparently, for many geeks the company can do no wrong, like Google. I have no such compunctions, as I have in the past received completely unsolicited spam from them, and thus as far as I am concerned, they fit in the “scum” category.

• In a great illustration of the power of cognitive dissonance, TiVo is another company with rabid and uncritical fans. Originally, TiVo PVRs would remain somewhat functional even without the TiVo service. Sure, you would have to program shows manually, but that is no worse than most VCRs. Over successive software updates, TiVo have reduced their PVRs’ autonomy until they are now effectively useless without the service.

• Inkjet printer manufacturers use all sorts of tricks to protect their racket, including putting in microchips designed to foil refilling or the use of third-party cartridges. Lexmark even tried to abuse the DMCA to prevent a competitor from selling reverse-engineered cartridge chips. All this so inkjet ink can remain the most expensive liquid, at significantly higher cost per milliliter than Chanel No. 5 or vintage Dom Perignon.

As in most cases the utility of the machine without the overpriced refills or service is nil, the fair market price for it should be zero. The Vonage/Linksys situation is a special case as the wireless router remains partially usable, albeit without VoIP features if you switch providers. But marketers will keep trying to have it both ways until consumers push back by implementing a zero-tolerance policy, akin to the “broken-window” theory of policing. Do not accept to pay for a cell phone from a carrier that refuses to unlock it after a reasonable amount of time. Refuse to purchase digital devices that require service from a specific vendor to function.