Blog: Bad Products

Apple's iPhone is being released today amid tremendous anticipation and publicity. Several people have asked me if I'm going to buy one. But despite the great innovation it represents in mobile technology, the iPhone is also a step backward for some of the worst practices of the mobile industry, and I'm not planning to get one.

The phone will only work on AT&T's network, unlike other GSM phones, making it impossible for a customer to lawfully purchase it and then connect it to another GSM network in the U.S. (T-Mobile) or any GSM system overseas. This is the same AT&T that recently announced its intention to built technology to spy on its customers on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA.

AT&T will charge an early termination fee if you cancel service, even though they don't subsidize the phone at all, despite the widespread claim in the mobile industry that the purpose of the ETFs is to recoup their cost of providing a free or discounted phone with activation.

And worst of all, the iPhone doesn't allow third party applications at all - even worse than Verizon's practice, the previous worst, of requiring all application writers to go through an arduous approval process and pay high costs to Verizon. The iPhone does allow AJAX Web apps to run on the phone's Safari browser, which ameliorates much of the problem, but that has many limits, most of which aren't yet known. Will the apps be able to access the camera or microphone? (Porbably not.) Will they be able to take advantage of the innovative input gestures like zooming by moving fingers closer or farther? Access the address book? Save files locally? Apple could have built an API for developers, but they've never been particularly interested in fostering a development community around their technology.

Many defenders of wireless industry practices like early termination fees and locking argue that if consumers really cared about these things, they wouldn't purchase phones and plans with them. Well, I'm not purchasing an iPhone. And I hope you won't either.

Working Assets Wireless has launched a campaign to pressure Steve Jobs to unlock the iPhone for any network and has done a terrific job of building awareness of Apple's and AT&T's anti-innovation, anti-consumer practices. I encourage you to sign their petition, and most of all, don't buy an iPhone.

I wrote previously about Intuit and H&R Block's efforts to block California's Ready Return program. Ready Return would send taxpayers with simpler returns (wage income only, for example) an already filled-out form, which they could simply review and sign. But making taxes easier hurts sales of TurboTax, so not only is Intuit lobbying against the program, they donated $1 million to the Republican candidate for California State Controller, since Democrat John Chiang supports Ready Return.

This is truly shameful behavior by Intuit. A company is pouring large amounts of money into a political race for the sole purpose of making people's lives more complicated, in order to sell them products they might not otherwise need. Are we next going to see private security companies supporting candidates who'd cut the budget for police protection? That would be unthinkable, and so should be Intuit's behavior.

"Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first." Thus begins a Wired column about California's ReadyReturns, a program that mailed already-filled-out returns to taxpayers whose only income was likely to be wages, which the state already knows - and a program opposed by H&R Block and Intuit because it would diminish the need for taxpayers to shell out extra money for tax preparation services.

This is reminiscent of the arguments copyright cartels use to justify extending copyright terms. In a choice between giving one small group a chance to make money against the interests of the public in general, sadly the public interest loses far too often because of the distorting effect of money in politics and the way entrenched, narrow interests are more likely to spend money to advance those interests.

As I was reading the article and musing upon the similarity of the two arguments, I reached the bottom and saw the byline - Lawrence Lessig. Aha!

Sending out Evites where the name of the hosts is something that gives little to no clue as to who is throwing the party, like "Joe, Bill, and Dave" or "Super Dude and the Amazing Princess". It's hard to decide whether to come to your party if I can't figure out who you are!

Email. It has a To: line, a From: line, a Subject:, some other headers, and a message body. Inside the message body is where the information goes that the sender wishes to convey.

Except when that email is sent by Evite. When Evite sends an invitation on behalf of an individual, it deliberately omits the actual details of the event, I presume specifically for the purpose of forcing the recipient to go to the Evite page, where they can be assailed by Evite's advertising.

It would be far more useful to both the sender and recipient of the invitation if the invite simply contained the pertinent details. Yet it does not. This may be rational behavior on Evite's part, though it's too bad no real competitor has emerged since then able to offer this most obvious of improvements.

Friendster is even worse, actually, when someone leaves a message for you on their service: Friendster then sends you an email saying "You have received a Friendster message from " with a link to the message. If I have a message from that person, why oh why can't you simply send it to me?

You check into a hotel after a long flight. You've been traveling all day and want nothing more than to crawl into bed. The last thing you want is to encounter an inscrutable alarm clock that requires at least six different buttons to set the alarm, and of course the hotel doesn't include the instructions.

Yes, there's the wakeup call, but I've answered the phone and fallen asleep again in the past, so I want the extra alarm. But for some reason some hotels don't think it's important that they select an alarm clock that's easy to operate. The most common IQ test masquerading as alarm clock I've encountered is the Sony CD Dream Machine.

At the hotel where I stayed in San Francisco this past week, there was an even worse one, but magically they replaced it with something else during my stay! But this clock took me 10 minutes to figure out how to set the alarm, and then it never went off after all - even though it had gone off the previous day at 6 am when I *didn't* try to set it, it had no obvious indication of whether it was on or off.

Runner-up dishonorable mention for user experience of the day goes to Evite. When someone sends me an invite, I get a completely useless email whose only function is to get me to click to the Evite page so they can show me ads. It doesn't put any of the details of the party in the email, so in order to find the Evite later I can't search for the date or location or anything like that, only the first name of the person who sent me the invite (but not their email address, since Evite uses info@evite.com as its From address). And then Evite actually goes down from time to time, making it completely impossible to get any party details whatsoever. It seems like someone should be able to build a better invite system (it's not exactly complicated) and find a better way to pay for it.

I just came across this terrible site for what's actually quite a good bar. Let's list the number of pages I have to go through to get *any* information.

1. The first page just says DETECTING FLASH PLAYER... making me wait at least ten seconds.

2. Then we get the "Detecting Your Version Flash Player" page, which also takes seconds - until I give up and click on the itty bitty link. I can't help but notice the lengthy list of requirements for my machine, including the amount of RAM! I'm looking for a non-Flash version here, but alas none is evident.

3. Finally admitting I have Flash, I now get a splash page I have to click through, with a hard-to-read "ENTER" button next to a very easy-to-read-but-not-what-I-want "CLICK HERE TO MAKE YOUR RESERVATION NOW!".

4. Now I see "This website contains sound, please adjust your speakers" - ah, another page telling me what my machine needs to "enjoy" their site, also being yet another feature of a site I really would rather not have at all. I click Skip Intro, and...

5. Finally, the main page, with - yup, light red text on a dark red background. Since my mouse cursor was already in the middle of the page, one of the four menu choices "helpfully" zoomed over to my mouse, making it hard to read (the cursor is partially obscuring it) and also hard to scan all the choices since one is out of line.

6. I try to get directions, and have to endure yet another animation before it will give them to me. And the map has tiny hard to read street names, but very easy to see cars zooming up and down the avenues. I'm so glad it reminded me that there's traffic! Now if only I could read the tiny street numbers. I also love how the map has buttons to move it, but when it scrolls, there's no more map to see.

Everyone thinking about designing a site should read The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 and the associated blog, The Daily Sucker.