Striking data on the sometimes low levels of customer tolerance, knowledge, and experimentalism:
“A study by Elke den Ouden of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands found that nearly half of the products returned by consumers for refunds are in perfect working order, but their new owners couldn’t figure out how to use them.
She discovered that the average American consumer would fumble with a new device for only twenty minutes before giving up and returning it to the store. This was true of cell phones, DVD players, and MP3 players. More surprisingly, she asked several managers from Philips (the Dutch electronics giant is one of her clients) to take home a handful of products and use them over the weekend. The managers, most of them tech savvy, failed to get the products to work. ‘Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created, she wrote.’”
From pp. 60-61 of Leander Kahney’s Inside Steve’s Brain (Penguin Group, 2009).