It was with great hope that we purchased our latest round of cell phones. New phones! Surely these will work better than our last phones, with their clunky interfaces, their difficult voicemail, their poor sound quality. My boyfriend was enchanted with the Razr phone, because he’s a technogeek & a sucker for marketing; I, being frugal, opted for the Verizon phone o’ the month, a little clamshell model that I figured would be basic, pared down, simple to use.

No such luck, of course.

There are a couple things I want to do with my phone. I want to make and receive audible calls. I want to see who called me when I wasn’t around. And I want to put phone numbers in it. That’s it, that’s all I want, and I suspect it’s all most people want. Even my technogeek boyfriend doesn’t want his phone to do more than that—he just wants to look cool while he’s doing it.

Let’s start with the Razr phone, because we paid actual American dollars for it. Sure, it’s thin. It’s so thin that it’s hard to speak audibly into, especially if you have a big head, as both of us do. The buttons are hard to push. Speaking to someone on this phone is like talking underwater.

Both phones offer a plethora of options, even mine: a calendar, games, different display images, the ability to download ringtones. But all of these options mean that to get to what you want—your missed calls, your messages, your phone book—is a multi-click operation. Take missed calls, for example. This is something you want to know quickly—who called and when. On my phone, missed calls are separated from received calls, for some unknown reason. And when I miss a call, all it tells me is I have voicemail. Now, it would be a simple matter to show me, when I open the phone, all the calls I missed since I last looked; but it won’t do that. I either have to call voice mail or click through to “Missed Calls” and try and figure out which ones were recent (since it doesn’t show a time unless you click through to the detail.)

And ringtones! My phone came loaded with a set of incredibly lame ringtones, I presume so I would download more. Okay, I’m a sucker, and also kind of juvenile—I wanted a disparaging ringtone for people I don’t want to talk to, something like maybe a bodily noise or maybe “Ding-dong the witch is dead.” But, get this, my very basic phone doesn’t let me download new ones! Here I am, a potential customer, willing to pay 99 cents for an 8K midi file, and they won’t let me.

The boyfriend’s phone isn’t much better. You can download ringtones, but they are organized so oddly that it’s impossible to find one you want. Loaded into libraries with names like “Cool Music” and “Ringtone Heaven” and “New Hits”, each filled with thousands of tunes… where do I find “My Adidas” in all of that? Because I want my ringtone to be “My Adidas”, not something by 50 Cent. (All the ring tones appear to be songs by 50 Cent, actually.)

It’s bad enough that buying one of these things--and the attendant confusion over calling plans--is a gigantic pain. But why, oh why, can they not make the simplest concessions to user experience? Clearly the best minds in engineering are applying themselves to creating new phones. And yet the simplest things—things which make life incrementally and geometrically more difficult over time—are neglected.

I’ve spent much of my professional career examining how humans interact with machines--specifically, computers with screens--and attempting to ease that innately difficult interaction. I, too, occasionally miss things that would make a web site or application easier to use. But I generally work with incredibly limited time and limited money—unlike Motorola, who spends years developing a phone like the Razr.

It’s unbelievable to me how much of life is like the cell phone experience—how often simple, easy solutions could improve people’s lives immeasurably. Placing straws near the drink machine in a carryout restaurant, allowing people to deposit nickels in parking meters, allowing enough space for strollers in stores, offering a “Press 0 to speak with the operator” option on voice-jail systems… these are just a few of the countless times when a little thoughtfulness about user experience could literally change people’s lives. What seems like a tiny annoyance, repeated often enough, becomes a major aggravation over time.

It’s these tiny details that we try to notice when we’re creating interface designs. They’re easily overlooked, because they seem trivial—does it really matter whether Contact Us is on the top right or footer, or whether a web-based admin has a global navigation scheme? But it does matter, when you think about it from the users’ perspective. When humans interact with machines, fractions of seconds matter greatly to their overall experience, and hunting and pecking is a frustrating experience for anyone.

In an age of limited attention, it’s incumbent on us designers to think long and hard about the minutiae. In fact, it can make all the difference in the world.