User Experience of the Smart Phone's design from the Standpoint of Durability

What a long winded title...

The point of this task is to gather data for analysis of UX (user experience). I've approached the design of the modern smart phone. To clarify, the modern smartphone as set by the standard of the original iPhone and the phones classified like it afterwards. This is in contrast to the original smartphone being a smartbrick from the 90s. I chose to source data for this topic because I care quite a bit about planned obsolescence.

First things first, 7 answers is what I got from putting it out there. Graphing it is kind of like a fire blanket for a candle. Plainly ineffective and better for large applications. It does however include some very good anecdotes which I'll use to show what I found.

Before I include anything too serious, I would like to collect my favourite responses and put them first to show the problems with my survey writing.

When writing the survey I did not consider the emoticon as a concept.

This one is just sad and info I didn't need to know.

I just like this one.

There's no elaboration just one word "bad". The freedom of interpretation rivals many pieces of modern art.

All of those responses were from different people, but I didn't really expect them in the way that I got them. The questions I asked went as follows.

1.How often do you replace your phone?

2.Why did you replace it? (if you did)

3.What brand is your phone?

The original objective of the questions was to see if there was correlation between brand and longevity.

All I found was sadness.

The initial idea of the survey was to keep the questions short to increase the likelihood of responses which is the cause of many issues. The first thing I could improve on with this survey is the framing of the questions. I asked "how often" but should of gave a unit like years. Because some gave years, some gave vibes on when it should break like "never" or "rarely". Another problem was how I framed the second questions. It should of been something like "Are Physical or software issues more common?" and maybe follow ups like "has it caused you to replaced your phone?".

Overall I thought I was specific enough, but the ingenuity of man to include ":(" and "bad" and lamenting about owning an iPhone shows that sourcing data is a fine art.

The next section is all the responses and then I'll talk about what UX we can learn from it.

Most who responded owned an iPhone and generally the iPhone users report not having to replace it at all. Unless it broke which was reported to be about 2-5 years. The single Samsung user said 2 years, a problem with the limited sample size is a lack data on this. Most got a new phone when their last one broke, the only confirmed reason for a breakage is an incident with a pool. The only case recorded of someone getting a new phone without breaking their old one was just a case of getting a hand-me-down.

This has shown me just how hard a good survey is. A skill I should work on. Or even work on using other methods for gathering data.

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