Companies hurry to sell us stuff.
Companies hurry to design new stuff to sell us.
We can't get half of the stuff to work.
This weekend my daughter bought the GameCube game at ToysRUS. My son bought a GameBoy device at BestBuy. We could get neither product to work at home. Very disappointing at any age, but especially when you are age seven or nine. Back to the stores to wait in line and argue against their open box return policy.
Dutch researcher Elke den Ouden at the Technical University of Eindhoven found that:
"Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can't figure out how to operate the devices.
...Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as "nuisance calls.
...The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.
...Most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition."
Links: Yahoo story quoted here. Photo by: Annie Wong under Creative Commons license. BBC story on useability. Easy button SM Staples.