Lessons I learnt from the new Nokia 3310
Preface
I’m a low-key person, who rarely post my thought or my personal stories on any social network. Because I don’t think my personal life is that interesting after all :), and those stories, if written, will just bore my dear audience to death.
But when I DO want to post, I want to post something educational, something meaningful so that I’m not wasting anybody’s time to read my article, and I’m not wasting my time to write and revise it as well :)
So here I am, writing my first post on Medium. As a software developer + entrepreneur, I of course would like to share what I think, what I learn and what I believe on my journey of creating useful (hopefully monetisable) product for users to use. I would feel rewarded if my articles are useful and readable to my readers. So…let’s get started!
The Story
Today, I’d like to share some fresh lessons I learnt from Nokia, the once almighty, dominant player in the mobile device industry.
This time I learnt it from a customer’s perspective, a customer who bought a classic remake of the mobile phone we all know, Nokia 3310, as a gift to his dad.
Let’s give our characters some fake names so that you, my dear audience, can follow the story along more easily. In this “Based-on-true-story” story, we have our two main characters:
1. Joe, a son who bought a Nokia 3310 3G to replace his dad’s unusable phone
2. Nicole, an unlucky Nokia support who handled Joe’s online enquiry
One day, Joe bought a new black Nokia 3310 3G, made in Nov 2017, and gave it to his dad.
Joe’s family had bought a number of phones for his dad, smart phones, 2G phones, 3G phones, you name it. Joe’s dad wasn’t like Joe, because of his age, he couldn’t learn to use new phone easily. If it involved more than 3 steps, Joe’s dad would have trouble remembering them. His family had bought simpler and cheap phones, which were produced in China and claimed to be elderly friendly. As we all know, cheap + M.I.C. = disaster, hence those phones didn’t last long.
In Joe’s head, he searched for the answer to a more durable, easier to use phone, Nokia 3310 came to his mind. He therefore bought a new Nokia 3310 3G with HKD$440. He thought, “This new Nokia 3310 won’t screw my dad up, because it’s just so stupidly simple to use and the old version of it was so durable that it could break rocks!”
Unfortunately, Nokia proved him wrong. Nothing was wrong about the durability (unknown, untested yet), but definitely something was wrong about the “simple to use” illusion: it was stupidly simple to use because Joe was the user, not his dad.
Lesson number 1: Put yourself in your user’s shoes. Don’t think that something that works for you will equally work for your user, especially when your user is very different from you (in terms of age, ethnicity, education, etc.)
As Joe brought this new phone back, his mom started whining, “Yet another phone! How many phones do we need to buy for your dad? Where’s the old one?”, “The old one’s broken! Even I can barely hear the caller’s voice from it!”, Joe said. Joe’s mom wasn’t satisfied, because she was the one who bought the previous M.I.C. phone.
Joe ignored his mom’s mumbo jumbo, and started teaching his dad how to use the new 3310. The apparently easy mission became an hour of tutoring because of one simple task: unlocking the phone.
Unlocking the Nokia 3310 3G requires 2 steps, according to the user guide:
However, in reality, to unlock the phone, it involves 3 steps:
- Wake up the phone by pressing the power key
- Select Unlock
- Press *
And here the magic number 3 casted its spell once again on Joe’s dad: he just couldn’t remember those 3 steps! And Joe hadn’t started teaching his dad how to make a call yet.
“You need to first press the power key, then select Unlock, then press *”
“No, this is the call key, not power key”
“You need to press * quickly after pressing Unlock, otherwise you need to redo it again… Look! The phrase ‘press * to unlock’ disappeared! We need to unlock it again now…”
Lesson number 2: When teaching an elderly to use your new fancy stuff, the ingredients are: patience, patience, and more patience. Unless your new fancy stuff is designed to be so stupidly simple such that it takes less than 3 steps to use.
With all the frustration, Joe started to look for ways to avoid those 3 steps. “Could I just disable the goddamn select Unlock and press * thing? Although dad may accidentally press keys, at least he can go back to a clean state by pressing the power key a few times and then start from there”, Joe thought.
Thanks to his job, Joe knew one thing well: RTFM (Read the F*cking Manual).
Joe soon found something called “Automatic keyguard”, which was just right above the “Unlock the keypad” part in the user guide. He quickly turned that “Automatic keypad” option off, hoping to solve the problem once and for all. Yet to his surprise, nothing happened.
The lock was still there. When the phone was awakened by pressing the power key, the phone was still locked and he still needed to perform those steps to unlock it.
“*%#$$@(#$)%#$”, Joe cursed silently to himself, angered and embarrassed. He was embarrassed because he deemed himself a tech-savvy, and he thought choosing a right phone for his dad couldn’t be easier. However, Joe was too naïve to believe that big brand would do its product right, even it was a remake of the brand’s most famous model in history. And for the anger, my clever reader, you know where it came from.
Lesson number 3: Do not believe in fame. Once famous model doesn’t mean the quality of the successor will be as high as its predecessor, especially when the company doesn’t focus its energy on that model anymore.
Again, out of his instinct trained by his job, Joe started Googling to search for solutions.
Joe soon reached online community of Nokia’s homepage for help. Not only that, he also started a chat with a Nokia support to see if he was just too stupid that he couldn’t find the right option to turn off. That’s how he met Nicole.
(Here is the actual dialog happened between Joe and Nicole, with Nicole’s real name hided, because Joe was a gentleman and did not want Nicole to be punished by her Boss if this story was published)
Lesson number 4: Testing in developing any kind of products is important, no matter it is hardware or software. When you or your developer feel lazy and skip writing test cases, it will bite you someday.
Lesson number 5: Not providing bug fixes / software updates to hardware nowadays is selfish and unethical, because you leave your customers in limbo and they have no way out. Your customers are not intended and prepared to buy your product which gives them an one-way ticket to limbo after the purchase, I can assure you.
Lesson number 6: Sometimes you need to work around things, that’s just life. Just like how Joe put numbers on the phone to teach his dad those steps, even when he didn’t want to. But keep this in mind, because once you need to work around things, it means something is broken. And when something is broken, it means opportunity to create a better product to replace the broken one.
So here you go my friends, these are the lessons I learnt from Joe’s experience. Thank you Nokia for providing us a fun and educational story. Hope you all enjoy the article! I myself will definitely keep this article always on my bookmark list to remind me of these invaluable lessons so that I won’t make these mistakes when I’m creating products / building my startup.
Until next time!
p.s. Joe’s dad will keep using the Nokia 3310 for a couple of days to see if he can overcome the unlocking steps with Joe’s workaround. If he cannot make it, Joe will give him an iPhone to try, although one still needs to take more than 3 steps to call someone using an iPhone if I’m correct. Siri may come to help though ;)
p.p.s. The Nokia support Nicole showed rapport and empathy during the chat, which is very nice, especially when she was facing a potentially very angry customer online.
p.p.p.s. I don’t know if Joe can get a full refund from the shop where he bought the Nokia 3310, because it’s still working fine, you can call someone without a problem, and it definitely sounds clearer than the previous M.I.C. phone when calling.
