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It's a'hard, it's a'hard, it's a'haaaaard ...
I'm planning to write an essay for this journal and the e-newsletter, and I need your help.
Theme: [The Internet/The personal computer/Consumer technology in general] is still too hard to use.
So do me a favor. E-mail me your anecdotes, or your mom's anecdotes, or your friends', as long as they're relevant to that theme. Or post them as comments. You don't have to name names, as long as you tell real-world stories of usability problems. And I'll give you full credit.
Both blogs
A friend of my father is an academic, and works for a university in northern England. A few years ago it became university policy that all lecturers must have a PC, and though he had always resisted having one they put one on his desk regardless as part of this policy. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge that he had any use for for it as a computer, he developed an ingenious system of writing all his appointments and aides memoire on post-it notes and simply moving them up or down the turned-off monitor screen on his desk as they became increasingly or decreasingly urgent. It isn't clear that he ever actually plugged the thing in, but with the aid of his post-its he used it to manage his appointments nonetheless.
Jay,
I think you may be overlooking a critical area: Security. In addition to being too hard - a lot of today's technology is pretty darned unsafe. Recent FTC reports indicate the amount of money stolen through identity theft via phishing, spyware, key-loggers, malware, etc. is somewhere around $200 billion. Yes, billion. And sites like MySpace are among the worst in distributing spyware and adware.
In addition, the 'hard to use' problem compounds the security problem. Try explaining to my Mom why she needs SP2 and a personal firewall?? Good luck! Hard to use technology can not only leave you with a bad user experience, it can help the bad guys empty your bank account.
Mathew Thomas
Sunbelt Software