User Interface Engineering

Oooh.

Not good news for the SmartPhone industry, according to Mobile Marketing Magazine this month:

63% of [SmartPhones that are] being returned have no fault.

This figure, unearthed as part of a study into mobile device returns trends in the UK, places mobile phone ‘No Fault Found’ returns at a level 13% above the average for the consumer electronics sector.

With operators, manufacturers and retailers collectively covering administration, shipping and refurbishment costs approaching £35 per device, this equates to a potential cost to the UK mobile industry of £54 million, and more significantly a global industry cost of $4.5 billion (£2.3 billion).

and

In some of these instances (24%), the user had resorted to abandoning the device after a lengthy and frustrating battle with the usability of functions or applications. This provides a clear indication that manufacturers still need to invest considerable time and effort into the user-centered design and modeling of device software.

A recent study in the Netherlands reported an average timespan of 20 minutes a user will devote to attempting to use a service before abandoning it. Alarm bells should be ringing for the industry when the manual set-up of an e-mail service on a device alone can take a minimum of 20 minutes, even before the user attempts to understand how the program works.

Any idea how experience problems affect your industry?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Experience Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.