Why do we get frustrated when technology fails?
I’m not talking about when it breaks. I understand that things wear out eventually, and that complex things wear out faster. (Though a friend of mine did have a minor crisis when her MyBook external HD holding her last four years of creative work crashed in less than a month.) I don’t know about anyone else, but when a piece of technology that I’ve purchased to make life easier or more enjoyable crashes, I get really frustrated.
Case in point is my Garmin FR305 – a GPS watch designed to help runners track their workouts. I had run with, and was an ardent fan of, a Nike+ setup for quite a while. In fact I was part of a group flown to Nike HQ in Oregon a while back to discuss the future of the system and how it served my needs. But once I realized just how innacurate it was, I stopped running with it. The social draw of the Nike+ just wasn’t enough to keep me as a user. So I “upgraded” to the Garmin.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t served me much better. Sure, it’s GPS based, so the accuracy is there. But the software that Garmin has created to interface with the data is terrible. So much so, in fact, that I put off uploading any runs for about six weeks. Of course, when I went to do so this morning, the process failed repeatedly. No error message. No upgrade prompt. It just sat there, leaving me once again furious that Garmin can’t manage to come up with a simple system that just works.
Which led me to the question…why? Do we get just as angry when our non-technological things fail? Or has the bar simply been set so high by the things that do work, that we assume everything should function with thge same ease? Of course, I purchased my Garmin with the expectation that it would work - with ease. Am I really out of line by getting upset when it doesn’t do exactly what I bought it to do? Would I care as much if it were cheaper?
In thinking about these questions, I’m reminded of a post that I wrote a few months ago that was based around a statement we kicked around here at POKE for a while:
The evolution of digital technology has created expectations in consumers that brands simply don’t live up to.
While the application of this statement is a little different in this post than in the last, the words themselves still ring true - though we could change “brands” to “products”. The good bits of technology that I interact with (and those that I’ve been a part of building) have taught me what’s possible. They’ve created the expectation that everything else should live up to the same standards. Unfortunately, too many products are either rushed to market or just not thought out well enough to begin with.
Jason Baer wrote up a great post a couple of days ago called Are New Customers the Enemy of Success? in which he challenges that brands are ignoring the age-old maxim that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to attain a new one. While I agree with Jason’s point whole-heartedly, I’d challenge that the same thought should be applied earlier in the process. Before we even consider buying new customers vs. holding onto the old ones, perhaps brands should spend more time creating a product that will attract customers on its own. Something that’s so useful, so well thought-out, that people flock to it without the need for advertising. To borrow from well-known terms build me a Purple Cow people!
If you build it, they will come. Here’s a challenge to Garmin - and anyone else out there: take your 2009 advertising budget - heck take HALF your 2009 ad budget - and hand it to your engineers, developers, and UI team with a simple ultimatum: make it better. Every penny that you roll back into the perfection of your product will do far more for your brand than any print ad you’ll ever make.
Want to do it even better? Take the other half of that ad budget and use it to talk to people. Ask them what you could do better. Share your technology and ask them to help if you have to! People are interested in having something that does what they bought it to do. And if you invest some interest in them, they’ll be more than willing to help you do it.
