User Interface Engineering

When Ashley published her post on Airport User Experience, the first thing I thought of was Apple Airport User Experience - AirPort is Apple’s trademark for WiFi wireless networking. As a technical person, I’m usually the one my friends and family turn to when technical things need to be installed or fix. So I’ve installed quite a few wireless networks.

If you’ve installed a wireless network, then you know it can be one of the most trying experiences for any technology consumer. David Pogue, a technology expert, author and tech columnist for the New York Times recently had a run in with a couple of wireless networking products.

Installers are an interface that no consumer or reviewer ever really thinks about. Unless it’s a poor experience. Then your latest product that you’ve staked the company’s quarter on might get 1100 words and a video on how bad an ordeal you put them through.

David was so infuriated with his experience that his wife implored him to stop reviewing wireless routers altogether. Inclined to agree, he wrote up just one small piece of the experience in a blog post:

Home networking remains one of the world’s most frustrating endeavors; 30 percent of home-networking gear winds up getting returned to the store.

I’m about to illustrate one reason why.

Here, as thanks to Netgear for its hours of help during my router-hell week, is a free consultation–a design overhaul of its software installer–a $50,000 value.

Don’t be the design team who gets free consultation in the New York Times.

David goes on to describe his 15-step process to install just one part of the wireless network equation, a USB WiFi adapter. He was attempting to install the brand-new adapter on a virgin Lenovo ThinkPad Windows notebook.

Although not a usability expert by trade, David is certainly an experienced user (he has his own line of how-to books), which makes you wonder if he has trouble, who are installation experiences tested with?

Routers and wireless gear are an interesting example here since outside of the installation, if the product works as designed, it’s invisible to the consumer. Failures will be highlighted much more than successes. You might want to add the following to your spec sheet:

» UX team: Avoid the wrath of David Pogue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under Experience Design, Users . 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.