Compete on Usability

Goodbye, Moto! And don't come back

Motorola, the company notorious for its flamboyant Hello Moto! advertisements, has badly damaged its brand with the flawed RAZR cell phone.

I've been using a RAZR for a few months now, and it's a purchase I greatly regret. The controls along the edge of the top half of the phone are way too easy to trigger by mistake. On the other hand, I can barely operate the keypad buttons at all, they're so small and touchy. In the menus, it takes several confirmation steps to enter a new phone number, but you can delete a number forever with one accidental keypress.

Customer survey results show how deeply the RAZR's poor usability has cut Motorola. Three quarters of RAZR users wouldn't buy a Motorola phone again. The percentage of first-time Motorola users who won't go back to the brand was 85%.

Even in the cell phone market where style is king, usability counts for a lot. Providers are finding a growing customer desire for simplicity, and not for more features packed into a ever-smaller form factor.

Introducing the usability whipping boy: your cell phone

Very clever rant in the Guardian Online on the poor usability of the Samsung E900 phone. Cell phone providers would benefit immensely from halting development of  "a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots" and instead, building phones that compete to be the easiest for their target audience to use.

Perhaps the E900 is a great phone for teens, for example, but adults find it too complex.  Don't give the complicated phones away to the wrong audience.

Some companies are working hard on cell phones with clear, usable interfaces. It's always going to be a huge design challenge to fit so many features into the small, stylish package customers seem to want.