Molecularist

OK. So sometimes we shouldn’t make things too easy. But other times, we make things too goddamned hard when the process should be simple.

I was telling you about the 20-year old with the Nokia N93i I lent her. She loved making videos and was keen on posting them onto YouTube.

Making the videos was easy. Uploading them was not.

First, it was a challenge to get them onto our Mac – cable, browsing folders, dragging things over, managing it all.

Ugh.

Next, she was having the darnedest time getting them onto YouTube. There were constant failures. The FAQ told her mpeg4 wasn’t supported (it is).

Nokia recently cut a deal with YouTube, but it’s only for browsing, as far as I can tell. We couldn’t figure out how to upload via the Nokia.YouTube mobile pages.

She tried uploading from her phone. We searched a bit and saw ShoZu could do it. Well, not really, since it wouldn’t upload anything over 4MB, which is a really really short video on the N93i. We tried making the video smaller, but no luck.

Not to be dissuaded, she tried and tried until the videos started to properly upload onto YouTube.

To me, the story illustrates a few key things.

1) Unless the person is determined to do something, it can be really easy to lose a potential user if any part of the process is not smooth.

2) With all these moving parts, someone can make a killing by making this work smoothly and intelligently. YouTube tried, but 60MB files can’t be uploaded via email. Also, the apparently have poor error feedback during their upload process. ShoZu tried, but failed for me (though I bet 4MB is sufficient for most folk).

Has Nokia tried. I\m not sure. I need to walk over to the video guys and see what we can do to make this easier.

It’s the least I could do.

What do you think?

I sometimes hand folks I know one of our high-end phones to see what they do with them. All too often, I see folks with amazing devices and they are quite content to just call and SMS. Still, I try to see what real folk do with our devices (most of you don’t count!)

I have this 20-year old staying with us for a bit, so I handed her an Nokia N93i. I told her it had WiFi (which she understood, since all our computers at home have it), an amazing video camera (which she got excited about, in a YouTube way), and I told her that it could play her music in as good as any music player (and which 20-year old is not a music freak).

Well, first thing she goes off and do is download a bunch of songs from bands on MySpace, using the phone’s browser. It’s how she understands accessing stuff on the Web. Then she started taking some great videos of the bands she went into town to see (that’s another story).

I told her I was impressed that she was able to get online so easily. I didn’t think our devices made it that easy to use the WiFi (I later found out that the N93i has a neat WiFi sniffer).

A few days later, she was showing me something and I noticed that she was using the access point called ‘Internet’, which happens to be Sonera’s (her operator) 3G access point.

Ugh.

A quick check of her bill, via SMS, confirmed that she’d run up an incredibly high data bill.

It was too easy to get online. And the whole access point thing was new to her, so she didn’t think she wasn’t using WiFi.

Dammit, it said ‘Internet’.

Oy.

I quickly disabled the access point and she’s quite happy with that. She totally is comfortable with using WiFi when it’s available (and I think most folks would be).

But, we all try so hard to make things easy, that we forget the real folk, folks who don’t understand the way we build our software (all phone manufacturers do this access point thing), and we forget to warn them when we make it so easy for them to run up an amazing bill.

Nokia phones used to warn users about actions that would cause charges beyond the expected, but we then thought, I guess, that our users would have a clue.

Yeah, they have a clue. But, when the clues are hidden, and we make it all easy, how can they know really what they are doing?

OK, so Sonera might be partly at fault for a simple sounding access point. But, I think this is a good lesson of when making something too easy is not always the best solution.

What do you think? Any similar examples? Do you think that sometimes we need to make our devices dumber and a bit more resistant?