Release Date: October 18, 2006

Are Technology Products getting harder to use?

Consumers stumbling for 25 years

Mobile phones and PCs have been around since the 80s, the Internet grew up in the 90s, and MP3 players started to take off in 2000. Most popular technology products have had 5 to 30 years to master their consumer experience. Yet few people today can buy a new mobile phone, PC, or MP3 player and use it without reading the manual. Even fewer will explore new features or brands. Products today are more complex than ever before. Five Myths of Consumer Behavior, by Paul Allen Smethers and Alastair France, explains why technology products often fail and how to redesign them to achieve consumer adoption success.

Consumers struggle the most when companies don’t analyze their released products to confirm the assumptions made during the design phase. Some marketers will run reports, like Internet “unique visitor hit counts,” to find out how many customers tried their product or site, but knowing that a user tried a feature one time isn’t enough, and it certainly isn’t success. Users must also find enough value to want to return again in the future. To understand where the value really lies, companies must look deeper into their products.

Smethers and France analyzed billions of transactions by millions of users for some of the largest technology companies in the world. The results reveal why products often fail with consumers. For example, most consumers (85%) fail to find acceptable value on their first attempt with new technology products. People spend only a few minutes (3.4) looking at only a couple of features (1.2) before giving up. Half (45–65%) of the new users give up whenever the product presents a new decision or task. A few (7–15%) of the most determined users—the power users—are able to find the product’s value. Only the simplest products and features end up as winners.

Armed with this knowledge, it became possible for Smethers and France to create a new model for understanding consumer behavior. This new model explains why, for example, services like Google’s search engine was able to topple the once-dominant search leader Yahoo. Google had only one feature—a search box—and the users had no extra steps to find and use it. It was simple, whereas Yahoo pitched over 30 features on its homepage, creating a complex decision tree for its users. Google’s rise was destined.

Five Myths of Consumer Behavior is an easy read for the busy entrepreneur, marketer, or engineer, with 35 illustrations, 7 tables, and dozens of examples in only 150 pages. The book is distributed by Midpoint Trade Books, and will be available in all major bookstores in October 2006 for US $14.95.