Rakuraku Phone (らくらくホン, Easy-Phone) is a mobile phone series from Japan NTT Docomo specially designed for senior users to enhance their mobile experiences.
In a recent marketing campaign, the company is promoting it’s Rakuraku Phone Basic 3. On top of the usual features such as i-Channel internet portal and DECO ME-RU (picture email), one of the major selling point of this product is the “One-push Help Button“. According to the description page:
ワンプッシュ（長押し）でらくらくホンセンターの専門アドバイザーに無料でつながる「使い方」ボタン搭載で、使い方がわからなくても安心！
Translation: long-push the “Help” button and you’ll be connected to the “Rakuraku-Phone” Help Centre, where our advisor will kindly offer you assistance on how to use the phone. No more worries even if you don’t know how to use your phone!
Furthermore, I saw this advertisement poster on a train promoting this service:
ケータイの使い方に不安がある方に、
いちばん頼りになる機能は、
きっと「人」です。
Translation: for those people who are nervous about the how to use a mobile phone, “Human” is certainly the most dependable feature.
Technology is Confusing, How to Fix It?
Development of sophisticated technology is absolutely changing our way of living and give us more power to do more, but it also requires much technical knowledge and emotional commitment to use it. luckily, I am pretty comfortable with using complicated devices, as well as equipped with enough technical knowledge to understand how most of these things work. furthermore, if I don’t know how to use something, I’ll go online and search for tutorials and related articles. I am good at self-helping.
But as a designer, this is crucial to realized that, most of the average users see such device as just a magic black box, and when the user interface cannot communicate and deliver the functions that it promises to offer, users will feel nervous, frustrated, or even hate your products and company. To avoid such negative result, designer such consider the following approaches:
- Reduce and simplify features
- Design a simple and easy to understand user interface
- Make it easy to fix the device when it’s broken
- Provide easy assistance, or encourage community to help each other
When it comes to providing assistance, the ideal way is to have a professional, knowledgable human to help. However, it is not always a viable option for companies due to tight budget and reduced profitability.
Most of us should have experience calling a customer support hotline expecting to quickly resolve issues with a human representative immediately, only to be greeted by a robotic voice menu, which you must spend at least 10 mins to dig down and wait a queue for another 30 mins until some human can actually response to your call.
Even worse, some clever companies would implement voice recognition software to the voice menu system, and pretend to interact with you by “natural speaking interaction”. Instead of asking you to “push ONE for account status”, “push TWO for payment”…etc, you need to speak out “I want to check my account balance please” and pray that the software won’t mistaken your intention for the 4th time.
Some Examples of Human Assistance for Better User Experience
Rakuraku Phone — the senior-targeted phone is designed with a quick “Help Button” to offer human assistance as described above.
On-Star Navigation System — http://www.onstar.com/ with the buit-in OnStar button that comes with specific car models, drivers can get easy access to navigation, security and emergency supports by speaking to human representative.
Customer Support using Social Network — it’s becoming common for big companies to provide quick support to customers’ feedback, comment and complain on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It is said that some times it’s easier to get attention from a company via social networks rather than actually calling the customer service hotline or visiting retail stores for assistance.
Apple Genius in Apple Store — the Apple Store is commonly praised for it’s superb retail experience, and the Apple Genius is one of the major contributions to it. There specialists are knowledgable to the company’s products, so they can provide useful advises and helps.
