Maija, from Series 60 User Experience, was ready for a usability fight when she asked her friends why they didn’t browse the Web with their phones. Unfortunately, before she could get to the usability issue (there was one) she was stopped by complaints about price.
I think price is a false excuse, because folks will pay for things that are useful. Until she can get her friends to overcome their price concerns, they will never be able to find anything useful worth paying for.
Maybe Maija should go back and pay her friends’ browsing bills. Then she could get a peek as to how much usability comes to play in keeping folks from browsing. Also, her friends might find something useful they’d be willing to pay for.
What do you think?
And go read some of the comments she got. It’s all about price.
Link: S60 User Experience.
She got on to her operator’s home page, with the browser in a full screen mode “How do I get away from here, there’s just this whole page. I want to turn off this thing. I don’t like that it spends all my money and runs in the background”, she cried. I explained to her that the time is not the cost but the data transferred. However, she did not care – she just wanted out.
Couldn’t it have something to do with the quality of the sites? Go to nytimes.com from the browser that comes with your phone.
I think it is not primarily the price that keeps people away but the ‘I am not sure how much it costs’.