On Tuesday I wrote about the problem of choice, when you actually have no clue about what differentiates one product from the other.
Let us move on then to a product where you have tons of magazines about and could make an informed decision based on specifations: the cell phone.
On any given day I can spend 20 bucks on a couple of shiny mags, sit down, make a list of what I want and check the available phones against this list. If I consider myself particularly clever I could also use one of those shiny “cell phone finders” German providers all offer on their sites. And then I make a more or less informed choice, going home maybe thinking, “cool, now I got everything I wanted”. Then begins the Long Tail of using it.
You realize that todays cell phones’ manuals are not really well written, certainly not written with the consumer in mind. You realize that the function you usually press ‘0’ for now needs ‘#’. Or that you can’t put a certain menu item on one of the hot keys. Or that you’d like to link the phone to your flickr-account, but that you had merged that with your Yahoo account and now you can’t log into flickr on the cell the old way (don’t get me started…). And you are wondering that although you always connect through your home router in your den, the phone always offers you the FON router first. And the quirks add up and begin to wonder why, what looked great on paper, doesn’t really make you happy.
I then enter the phase of frustration, put the product away until I see myself mentally stable again to try once more.
Technorati Tags: product, longtail, frustration, shopping, cellphone