Pew study: Tech failure should not be an option

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

Feel discouraged or aggravated when your home Internet connection goes on the blink or your cell phone fritzes out, and you don’t know what to do?

Take heart, you’re not alone, according to a new survey, "When Technology Fails," from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which says that many consumers find it difficult to set up devices, are frustrated when technology breaks down and often need help from someone else to fix the problem.

“These findings are a signal to the designers of information technology that they have to do a better job of making these gadgets more user-friendly to segments of the population that don’t eat and breathe technology,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research.

Indeed, although many Americans households now have more than one computer, and cell phones continue to replace landlines in many homes, tech mass does not equal tech comfort. Bad technology can and does happen to good people.

A range of emotions
Because we’ve become so reliant on technology — more information is only available on the Internet, e-mail access has become vital, cell phones are crucial, and computers are important for Web access as well as playing games — our collective skins are thinner when any one of these devices or the services needed to run them is out of whack, as evidenced by the Pew study.

“Regardless of whether respondents had their computers, cell phones or Internet connections fail, they were equally likely to feel discouraged, confused, confident or impatient during the course of trying to fix the problem,” the study says.

Confident? Yes. Of the 2,054 adults surveyed, 72 percent said when their devices were down or broken, they felt confident that they were “on the right path to solving the problem.”

But there were other emotions, too, and they likely came two, three and four hours after “confidence” had evaporated: 59 percent said they were impatient trying to fix the problem; 48 percent said they were discouraged at the amount of effort it took; and 40 percent said they were confused by the information they were getting about how to solve the problem.

Among Pew’s findings:

• 48 percent of adults who use the Internet or have a cell phone say they usually need help from someone else to set up a new device or show them how to use it.

• In the course of a year, 44 percent who have high-speed, home Internet service said their connection failed to work properly, and 39 percent of those with desktop or laptop computers said their machines did not work properly. Those figures compare with 29 percent of cell phone users; 26 percent of those with BlackBerrys, Palms or other personal digital assistants; and 15 percent of those who have an iPod or MP3 player.

• When it came to dealing with tech problems, 38 percent said they contacted customer support for help; 28 percent said they fixed the problem themselves; 15 percent turned to family and friends for aid; 2 percent went online to find a solution; and 15 percent said they were not able to fix the problem.

“Those who had their computers fail most recently were equally likely to fix it themselves as they were to contact user support for help,” says the Pew study.

Not a surprise there, perhaps, because dealing with customer support sometimes can be more frustrating the tech problem itself.

Customer support is “oftentimes a lengthy process to go through, just to get to the point where you can really start addressing the problem,” said Horrigan. “So feelings like impatience and discouragement can certainly kick in.”

And that can mean a throwing-in-of-the-towel by those who can benefit greatly from technology — not just über-geeks or gadget freaks, but those who need to know and use tech every day.

It was this rather large group of people Pew identified 18 months ago in another study about different types of tech users.

“Fully half of adults have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology,” that study said. “Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master.”

The findings begged for a follow-up, Horrigan said. “We wanted to really probe, what’s going on with people who have a difficult time coping with the gadgets and services they have.”

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