I know that as a professional user experience practitioner I should avoid angry rants, as they’re (mostly) unproductive.
But here’s the thing: I am PISSED OFF right now, I feel cheated and abused by this printer’s designers, and I have no real recourse except to call out the manufacturer and tell them just how thoroughly they have failed me… and in all probability, many other customers.
I’ve owned this printer – a Canon MX860 – for about a month. So far so good, I’ve been able to connect it to my network and print plain paper documents with no problems.
So this morning I tried to print a half-dozen photos so I could send pics of the kids to my 99-year old grandmother. Sending attachments or a link to my Flickr account is not a viable option. She wants pictures, big pictures. Pictures she can hold in her hands.
No can do. I’ve spent more than 45 minutes crawling around the backside of this stupid time vampire of a machine, trying to figure out why it insists on printing from the rear tray, and realizing I don’t know how to load this until-now-unknown-to-me rear tray.
I’m angry. This stupid piece of crap printer just stole almost an hour of my time. And I still don’t have the damn pictures to send to my grandmother.
So you fail, Canon. You fail hard. It’s a pity actually. I really like and enjoy my Canon cameras. But you’ve just stolen – yes, stolen, as in consumed without my agreeing to it – an hour of my time. Think that’s a trivial amount? It’s not. Not when you multiply it by x number of people who’ve also struggled to print photos. And I’m sure “x” is not a small number.
