Fear of customising

In her Shift6 post last week danah queried who actually clicks on internet advertising and concluded that, far from the targets advertisers hope for, it may be those who tend not to use the internet in a focused way, possibly the least technology literate. Advertisers might be heartened by positive reports of the impact of Land Rover’s advertising on iPhone. iPhone users are a pretty select group and could well be just the targets Land Rover want. Certainly they are likely to make informed choices about what they browse. But to understand the real impact of the campaign itself one would also have to factor in the novelty impact (still) of the iPhone and the fact that iPhone appears to deliver a better browsing experience than any of its competitors.

And it’s that experience that I want to come back to. Because, as I commented on danah’s post, it’s so hard for users to get a good experience of the technology as it is presented to them, out of the box. Often organisations prioritise the functionality they want to attract users to – this could be because it adds pzazz at the point of sale (video telephony), or because, when used, the functionality can generate revenue (internet portal). And many users (perhaps most) do not know how to customise their device, or fear the consequences of playing around with the interface, concerned that customising will bring about irreversible results they hadn’t anticipated. On a mobile phone interface marketing priorities can be particularly irritating. There’s so little real estate, the manufacturer’s or service provider’s priorities can squeeze the options people actually want to use. Since it appears that the most frequently used functions on mobile phones are voice, text and time/alarm clock, you might expect many people to have those functions, and everything connected to them, immediately visible on their home screen. Often, surprise, they are not.

However, as danah’s post implies you are most likely to have focused access to the functionality you want if you have grown up with computers and mobile phones; put simply if you are young. Don Norman thinks younger people understand technology better because they have the time to play around with it. Certainly that’s a factor. A review by Hilary Coolidge also highlights the social element of technology use among teenagers, that peers are likely to be influential, providing opportunities to learn new skills, in a way that may not be typical for older users (last Saturday evening at a restaurant where I was eating a group of late teens were having a celebration meal. Every one of them was using their phone to snap and share pictures of their friends. It just wouldn’t have been the same with a generation older, at least not in the UK). And along with the time and social milieu, I think younger users are less scared of the consequences of tweaking technology settings. Perhaps this is naïveté (having sorted out my pre-teenager’s phone from over-exuberant tweaking I can vouch for that), perhaps justified confidence, or a combination of the two.

The need to respond to the combination of naïveté and lack of confidence was reflected in Stephen Fry’s post in his Guardian blog this week. In typical avuncular tones he encourages readers to desert the standard Internet Explorer or Safari default on their PC or Mac, and to consider using Firefox, with a step-by-step guide to how to do it. Handholding of this kind is exactly what people need in order to get the most out of technology and the comments on Fry’s post suggest his readers (of all ages) are grateful for it. Now I’m not suggesting that Microsoft or Apple should tempt their customers to ignore their proprietary software for open source alternatives (well, I might dream). But I do wish technology companies would open up the potential for customisation to their users, so that people can clear away what they genuinely don’t want to use and tweak what they are using so it best fits their needs. And, remembering the (possibly apocryphal) comment “I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I’m not going to read a book,” this possibility can’t be covered off via a paragraph embedded in a manual. It needs a more up-front approach: this piece of equipment (your phone, your laptop, your camera etc.) is yours to customise, just as you will move a piece of furniture to the place you want it after it has been delivered to your home. Sadly, we’re a long way off from that, so focused use and customisation remain the preserve of those who, firstly, know that customisation or alternatives to basic settings are a possibility; secondly, have sources of support to go ahead; and, thirdly, have the confidence to ‘just do it.’

Add comment December 13th, 2007