What h
appens when engineers believe that no matter what, the customers will buy? Rant on. Look at the forum discussions of problems after Apple’s release in November, or consider Google’s Gemini self-humiliation. Will users turn in their iPhones in disgust? Stop using Gmail in protest? What about the Tesla that is so cool it does not have to identify clearly how to open the door, or put the car into drive or reverse? Was the car returned? Will customers return a device they don’t understand? Consider Windows 11 updates are tormenting users, again per Microsoft’s own forum. Will people give up using the PC? Not likely.
Steve Jobs helped take the user out of user-centered design. Said Jobs: “It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” It took courage to remove the headphone jack, forcing users to buy an adapter. Today you don’t really need user acceptance testing for tech products because the many Internet forums, including the firm’s own Discussion Forum will reveal the lack of pre-release testing.
If features cannot easily be discovered, they won’t be used. Burying useful functions in Accessibility menus – when all users should know about those options. Did you know that closed captioning is an Accessibility, not General setting? But maybe in certain environments you might need it? What may have begun as a response to mandates in the Built environment is now a set of recommendations for the Web design. Do people know enough about them to identify non-compliance?
Stripping features from app versions – this also appears to be a ‘discoverability’ issue. Are people aware, for example, that Gmail settings are much more detailed on the web version compared to mobile? Half of US users are Gmail users – do the mobile users know what they can set via the web version? If a feature disappears or descends into a hidden menu (as with Microsoft Word), what role did users play in reviewing that change before it occurred? Rant off.
