Simple Things
A couple of articles turned up yesterday, independently reinforcing a point I discussed a month or so ago in a post titled Terror Cell. In that post I described purchasing a cell phone for my mom while she was visiting here, and the dismay I experienced at trying to show someone who’s used to just picking up a phone, hearing a dial tone and punching a number how to do the same thing with a device bristling with buttons, lights and noises. And this is someone sharp enough to routinely destroy her friends at bridge and keep getting invited back the next week.
It was validating, then, to see an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new product from Vodaphone called the Vodaphone Simply. It:
has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking. What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That’s because of who its market is: people getting up in years.
It turns out that this product isn’t a condescending sop for a PR angle:
Vodafone’s plan reflects the need for new sources of growth. Cellular markets in much of Western Europe and Japan are becoming saturated, so that the middle-aged and older are among the few places to look for new growth.
So, this represents a serious attempt to court a market segment that the industry simply wasn’t speaking to, and didn’t know how:
During development, young Vodafone product managers kept trying to add features, like software for sending picture messages. Mr. Laurence said no. He showed them an old TV comedy sketch about an elderly person being humiliated by a hi-fi salesman who delighted in the customer’s technical ignorance.
While developing ads for the phone
Mr. Laurence ran the ad by product managers working on fancy multimedia handsets for young people. “The more they hated it, the more we knew we were on the right track,” he says.
The phone isn’t being offered in the United States yet. The article explains that cell phone growth is still brisk here, so those who might embrace the product are stuck buying devices that they will spend more time squinting quizzically at than talking into.
I’m far from a Luddite, and I would strenuously resist the dumbing-down of technology to satisfy the lowest common denominator. I make my living helping people to use software and technology, and a lot of this involves coaxing them to accept change. But I also have to keep chanting to myself in my 50s a mantra that I coined in my 30s, “Give them what they want, not what you think they ought to want,” because I, along with 24-year-old cell phone store employees, tend to forget that owning my product is not the ultimate goal of my clients, they’re buying my product to accomplish their own ends, however pedestrian and myopic.
Even so, I find myself becoming increasingly weary when confronted with unwanted technological learning curves as a consumer. For one thing, I carry an uncomplicated travel alarm clock with me on trips in order to avoid spending half an hour setting the bedside clock in my hotel. Which brings us to the second article in this vein I’ve encountered this week. Countering a trend that saw hotel alarm clocks evolving into multifunction devices that also brewed your slacks and ironed your coffee, hotels are installing clocks that tests show can be set in less than 20 seconds. Gives you that much more time to figure out how to use the TV remote to order adult video.
