90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) –

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

This is a pretty interesting presentation from Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive Vice President (4/12/07). He says, fairly bluntly:

• Right now, the Nokia Handset User Experience has scope for improvement
• There are inconsistency problems between applications.
• Discoverability can be a problem (apps and content can feel ‘hidden’)
• Syncing and storage is currently difficult

Admitting there’s a problem, as they say, is the first step towards a cure. With a message like this coming from the top, we can expect some pretty radical improvements coming soon.

The iPhone isn’t mentioned, but I can’t help thinking that it’s spurred on a user-experience supremacy race. Great news for end-users.

| View | Upload your own