Mandatory Complexity
Yesterday I bought a cell phone for my girlfriend. To fully appreciate the magnitude of that proposition, you have to understand our relative positions on the technology-adoption curve. I’m what they call “bleeding edge.” Only recently have I actually started waiting for new gadgets to arrive in the stores and possibly even get reviewed before making the purchase. For years, I would comb company websites and brochures, burning with desire to be the first on my block with the latest-and-greatest. Eunice is what the business analysts call “late majority” – not exactly a Ludite, but definitely a techno-skeptic. Exhibit A? Here we are in 2005, and this is her first mobile phone.
In the case of this particular technology, there were three very reasonable barriers to entry.
- Cost of service relative to value
- Reluctance to be continuously available
- Complexity of product and service plan
The first point was addressed rather simply: I added her to my plan and am paying the bill myself. Her objection is still perhaps sound in theory, but it’s no longer a practical problem for her. The second point is equally valid, but offset by a mounting number of occasions when the convenience of being able to communicate at will offsets the annoyance of being reachable, or presumed so. Also, today I introduced her to the simplest way to enforce unavailability: the “off” button.
So we’re left with point number three: the matter of complexity. With regards to the service plan, even though I am paying the bill, Eunice is very conscientious about observing any restrictions so as not to incur additional charges (for which I am grateful). This means coming to grips with limitations on minutes, in-plan calling, peak hours, zones of coverage, use (perhaps inadvertent) of added-cost services such as GPRS, text messaging, 411 and downloads, and the other nuances that providers have maddeningly included in their contracts. Indeed, the whole notion of a contract rather than a pay-per-use model is structurally over-complicated and objectionable.
But that’s nothing compared to the phones themselves. I immediately understood that my own preferred hardware – a state-of-the-art Smartphone with all the bells and whistles (necessary for my work, of course…) – was not just a needless extravagance in her case, but an unambiguous negative. My instructions to the sales clerk at the Cingular store were “I want the smallest, simplest phone you’ve got.”
There, at the far end of the rack, was the little Samsung flip phone that’s practically free with the contract. Seriously, it was cheaper than the two bowls of noodles we got for dinner later that evening at the little Vietnamese place on the corner. And yet, despite picking the skinniest chicken in the shop, I had no doubt that I’d be spending the better part of the afternoon tinkering and adjusting and inputting and figuring out all the weird little quirks, flipping through a manual that probably sounds better in the original Korean, cramping my fingers on the tiny buttons and squinting into the backlit LCD.
Sure enough. There were menus and options, undocumented features, choices offered whose consequences were unexplained, sneaky ways to “conveniently” access additional features (such as downloading ring-tones and games) without mentioning their extra cost. There was the tiresome chore of entering 35 names, phone numbers and addresses, of figuring out how to pre-program the voicemail password so Eunice wouldn’t have to key it in each time, and decoding the peculiar iconography of the Samsung system, kinda-sorta like my Smartphone, but different in enough stupid, meaningless ways as to be confusing.
When I do all this stuff for myself, it’s almost second nature. I take it for granted that there’s a tradeoff between features and complexity, and it’s a bargain I almost always accept. Also, since I’ve been using computers since I was 13, I have absorbed a kind of implicit understanding of how features work, how menus are organized, and where developers are likely to have buried certain functions.
This time, though, I was doing it all through Eunice’s eyes, aware that I would have to explain all of this to her in understandable terms. And at that point, I began to wonder, how can anyone possibly expect the customer for the lowest of low-end cell phones to figure all this crap out?
I mean, in her case, I would almost pay extra for a phone that was just a pad with buttons. All you could do with it would be to make calls. No internet browser, no cheap camera, no currency converter, no fancy ring tones, no menus. Just a goddamned telephone that works as close to the phone in your house as possible. Oh, and being able to enter one set of addresses for your computer, home phone, cell phone and fax would be nice too.
And so, I say this as one of the 10% that like features for features’ sake: Enough already! Even McDonald’s lets you still just buy a plain hamburger. You don’t have to go for the whole super-sized Happy Meal with the Summer Blockbuster movie tie-in if all you want is a reasonable meat-flavored snack. Just because it’s almost as cheap to throw in every weird little button and feature that a geeky, gadget-obsessed designer can think of doesn’t mean you have to, or even should most of the time.
The core benefits of a mobile phone – being able to make a call whenever and wherever you want – provide sufficient value for the vast majority of customers. Muddying up that nice crisp value proposition with complicated and largely useless peripheral functionality probably drives away more customers than it attracts. It certainly has so far in the case of Eunice.
I’m reminded of the old quip about the man who tries to teach his pig Shakespeare: it wastes his time and annoys the pig. Today, mastering hideously complex consumer technology is way past the point of diminishing returns. It annoys and wastes everyone’s time, and yet developers feel their trapped on this escalator of feature-creep – a consumer electronic arms’ race to build the final doomsday gadget that does absolutely everything and fits inside a tube of lipstick.
I work in this industry. I understand the urge to expand, improve and upgrade. I personally would be angry and disappointed if some gizmo I bought were lacking a particular feature I wanted or needed. The stuff I personally happen to like is flooding the market because the people who are making it are just like me: guys of a certain age, living in particular types of environments, educated, able to afford their toys, and fluent in the assumptions of technology. But I’m the minority here. The serious minority.
This is just one facet of the increasing complexification of everyday life that’s silently contributing to mounting social inequality. In the microcosm of consumer electronics, as elsewhere, the elite minority gets the lion’s share of the benefits from innovation because their inside knowledge or sociological advantages reduce the effective complexity for them and allow them to maximize the utility of additional features. For everyone else, however, the “privatization” of complexity just outsources the investment that companies should be making in the accessibility of their products to the consumer.
Eunice, for example, is far more intelligent, organized and methodical than most people. If technology developers can’t make a product she can easily use and feel comfortable with, there’s a real problem – and it’s not with her.
So what’s happening is, this forced march into complexity is pissing people off and making them feel stupid and helpless. If you even complain about this, you sound like you just can’t keep up or have some problem with technological progress. And yet, discontent is rising. The marketing that’s generating demand for this stuff based on benefits and convenience is losing touch with the reality on the ground, which is that you have to be a certified network engineer to figure out how some of these devices actually work. Fortunately, our rights as consumers are some of the few rights we still have left, and the day of reckoning may be at hand.
I serve on the board of a non-profit devoted to helping seniors get the benefits of technology. There’s only even a need for such an organization because the companies that make this stuff are so clueless about how people other than them and their friends learn and use technology, and can’t even begin to explain themselves in ordinary language. In a few years, most Americans will be over 35. Most Europeans will be over 40. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out when that technology adoption curve starts shifting farther and farther left.
12:14:11 PM 
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