Wrong Assumptions, Sony Ericsson PC Suite

I got an email from a reader saying he had a usability issue to rant about, and could he do a guest post. I said sure thing. So without further ado, here’s a post from Andreas Bossard, proprietor of NewsOfTheFuture.net. I’ve got a Sony Ericsson phone too, and I’ve been annoyed by this little feature as well. I hope you enjoy UsabilityBlog’s first guest post, and a big thanks to Andreas for putting it together. -Paul

Every time I connect my Sony Ericsson phone to my Windows PC, I am reminded of an annoying feature of Sony Ericsson’s PC Suite: The time checker that checks if the time of the cell phone is the same as the time of the PC (see picture below).

Every time I connect it pops up and asks me if I want to change the time of my cell phone. The program assumes that the time of the PC is always correct. But the opposite is the case: The cell phone time is correct, but the Windows time is wrong. So I always have to select “No”. The funny thing is that “Yes” has the option “Every time I connect. Do not show this message again”, but “No” doesn’t ‘t have such an option.

sony_ericsson_pc_suite_popup

Only about 30 seconds difference, but PC Suite sees immediate need for action…

What designers can learn from this mistake:

  1. Make the right assumptions. Here it is assumed that Windows time is always correct, which may not always be the case.
  2. Give the user the possibility to disable an unwanted feature. Especially if it is an annoying pop-up window.

Note: The current version of PC Suite is version 3. This time-checker-feature was present in version 2. Nevertheless, it’s a good example of bad usability.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under Desktop Apps, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    It could be worse, I've got a Nokia N95 which has built in GPS. Usually the GPS tries to stream maps over the air, which costs a fortune. Fortunately they provide a piece of software which allows you to load maps directly onto a memory card. Unfortunately, it's one of the least usable applications I've ever come across. The biggest problem, and this is HUGE, is that when you add a new map, it deletes any existing ones. So, picture the scene, I live in the UK, and was traveling to New York. So the night before I left I loaded maps for New York State. Fine. Then, the morning after when I tried to navigate to the airport, the UK maps were gone! And to make matter worse, it's a non-standard Windows application, so all the buttons and controls look different (I can see no good reason for that), and there's no OSX version. The PC suite is just as bad (fortunately I can just use iSync on OSX, which is much easier).
 
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