John Battelle writes the excellent searchblog. A recent post, Rant: The Comcast HD DVR Is Simply, Terribly Awful, provides another example of a company lacking customer focus. See the comments for even more confirmation of the lack of customer focus.
The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail - and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse.
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Not to mention, the damn thing is slow - beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon.
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But that’s not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot. Turns out, the ####### Comcast HD DVR *does not have a hard drive.* That’s right, when the power goes out, the ####### box loses ALL OF THE SAVED PROGRAMS!!!!
Related: posts on customer focus (including doing it right) - Usability Failures - Customer Focus at the Ritz - CEO Flight Attendant - Companies in Need of Customer Focus - Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus
July 30th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
“It’s a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer confusion…”
June 14th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
[...] significant response one can only draw the conclusion that they are dealing with another Verizon or Comcast or the long litany of companies that cannot be trusted to treat you well or even remotely [...]
June 19th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
But these companies want to have the government allow them to create a monopoly (or something extremely close) … and further make ludicrous claims about what capitalism would suggest about regulation in oligopolistic markets…