When not to make something too easy

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?