today.reuters.com— Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can't figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.
Mar 6, 2006View in Crawl 4
i had a guy yesterday at walmart want to return a UNOPENED treadmill because a wheel had broke.. this was the box wheel which is supposed to help the customer wheel the box into there home .... it often breaks he did not realize the wheels were completely seperate from the actual treadmill ...even though it stated it on the box
we live in a massively impatient world, so of course people aren't gonna take the time to learn about something before giving it the biff! but with companies also impatient to deliver technology and get a return on their development $$ then which side should give?? From my experience building intuitive interfaces does not necessarily mean extra time and $$, just means getting better skilled/trained people that understand usability, and even if it does cost more then people will buy more of your products (eg. apple).. now that would be nice
Who eats the cost of a returned product? If the retail store eats a large chunk of it, there's not much incentive for the manufacturer to design a better product.
> Most of the comments here state that its the users fault because they dont RTFMI bought a product last week that I couldn't figure out how to open. Sure, the instructions for opening it were in the manual, but figure this: the manual was INSIDE the product!
matt_rubinMar 7, 2006
<a class="user" href="http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1130276636538&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper">http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1130276636538&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper</a>this router didn't work out of the box and i ghated it sop i returned it .... twice and bought a netgear one and surprise surprise it worked without any settings to change
mementhMar 7, 2006
i had a guy yesterday at walmart want to return a UNOPENED treadmill because a wheel had broke.. this was the box wheel which is supposed to help the customer wheel the box into there home .... it often breaks he did not realize the wheels were completely seperate from the actual treadmill ...even though it stated it on the box
docxxviMar 7, 2006
we live in a massively impatient world, so of course people aren't gonna take the time to learn about something before giving it the biff! but with companies also impatient to deliver technology and get a return on their development $$ then which side should give?? From my experience building intuitive interfaces does not necessarily mean extra time and $$, just means getting better skilled/trained people that understand usability, and even if it does cost more then people will buy more of your products (eg. apple).. now that would be nice
glsunderMar 7, 2006
Who eats the cost of a returned product? If the retail store eats a large chunk of it, there's not much incentive for the manufacturer to design a better product.
hordakMar 7, 2006
> Most of the comments here state that its the users fault because they dont RTFMI bought a product last week that I couldn't figure out how to open. Sure, the instructions for opening it were in the manual, but figure this: the manual was INSIDE the product!