A neighbor was having difficulty making sense of his router that Qwest sent him. He was moving from Comcast to Qwest DSL and decided to save a few bucks by attempting the setup and installation on his own. This is a guy who’s an engineer for Boeing. He’s a bright guy but was completely baffled by this combo router/wireless DSL modem.
His two sons tried to make sense of this contraption without any luck so they called me to see if I’d stop by and have a look which I did and eventually got them up and running. This is the part where I return home and make a comment to Kim about how I’m not worried about my job security.
The more technology permeates our lives the more we can’t live without it. Yet the makers of all this high tech stuff continue to make setup/configuration/maintenance as difficult as possible. Imagine you’re excited to have high speed internet at your home. You pull the Qwest provided router out of the box and plug it in. You then fire up your web browser to begin the setup process and you’re met with this screen:
How many people does Qwest think will understand a single concept on this page? I’ve worked on computers for the past 15 years and I have no idea what half this crap means. I know enough to just leave it alone and move on to the next screen. But if I were a regular computer user like 99% of the population I’d probably try out a few settings and foul things up. Or I’d become frustrated and call my son or daughter in to have a look. If that didn’t work I’d call a friend or neighbor who works with computers.
Why does it have to be this difficult? I know that Qwest doesn’t expect all its customer to become router experts, and, in their defense, they provide a workable instruction booklet with each kit they send out. The problems come in when things doing go as planned or you try to add another machine to your network, or you want to share printers or files. The process to make all this work is daunting to most folks and is seldom covered in the set of “QUICK SETUP” instructions that don’t require a CCNA certification.
I guess I should feel some sense of job security because people are going to need the services that I can provide. But I can feel their frustration and wonder if there isn’t a better way. It shouldn’t be so difficult to add another computer to your cable/DSL connection. Qwest should teach their customers why they should change their SSID and why they may not want to broadcast it. Why do companies continue to assume we all know the difference between PPPoE and PPPoA? Does it really need to be this difficult?
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