Ok so a bit slow off the mark here, but a story from last week found that Britons waste £52 billion on gadgets that they cannot operate every year. Also that 50% of functions are left idle on the majority of gadgets.
The tech blogs all sounded surprised at this, and from a techy point of view this is fair enough. Those with an interest in gadgets will be the ones who want all the extra features and functions, but what percentage of those who own, say a digital camera, are just people who want to just take a photo? I’ve got a half decent compact digital camera but for about 95% of the time it’ll just be left on auto mode as I can’t be bothered with changing the settings. And anyway, the auto mode takes decent photos which is all I need it to do.
Take the TV as another example, how many different functions are there on a TV? God knows, hundreds probably. But which ones do you need apart from the channels/inputs and volume? Maybe the screen resize one but the majority of sets now are clever enough to work it out themselves.
I was sat in an interview the other day where a client of ours was talking about when a technology has really made it into the consumer space, and this is when his wife and children could operate it without needing to play with the settings or wonder how it works (or in some cases why it doesn’t.) The majority of devices will now work out what functions we need and what settings are best, so it’s no wonder that the majority of consumers are happy to leave these alone and trust the product.