I've missed two weeks of entries here. I was on vacation for the US Thanksgiving holiday and then last week at a conference.
For Thanksgiving, I took a train (Amtrak) from California to Oregon. A nice, relaxing trip. I was surprised at how bad some of the guidance was.
Both in California and in Oregon, when the train arrived, there was no indication of which train car you were supposed to go up to. In contrast, when I was recently in China, my ticket clearly told me which car to go to, and when the train stopped the conductors came out and put numbers up by each door. Here, the rule seems to be that you just pick a car at random, hope it is the right kind (sleeper or coach) and they'll assign you to a seat then. I'm sure this is not a big deal once you are familiar with the system, but it was baffling to a first-timer.
Then, on the train, they'd (usually) call out the name of a city when the train stopped so you would know if you should get off. But, unless you knew all the stops, there was no easy way to tell whether this was the stop before your destination or far from it.
Both of these are more or less "first time use" user experience problems. These are the kind of problems that you can overcome without a lot of problem (you just ask an official-looking person). Yet, they could also be solved quite easily (a note printed on the ticket and a map near the entrance of each car would be minimally sufficient).
I found myself wondering why Amtrak didn't have solutions to these problems. While not critical problems, they are certainly dissatisfiers for more than just me and make the organization (Amtrak) seem a little unprofessional.
Yet, this is of course the same kind of problem many software products have. Presumably people within the Amtrak organization know how things work well enough that they don't stop to think what a newbie needs to know. They don't consider that a newbie hasn't memorized all the stops on each line. Similarly, software products often assume you already know the entire user model/app architecture or where all the commands are.
Like many software products, Amtrak probably doesn't recognize that first impressions really do count for a lot. If you spend your whole first trip on the train wondering "I wonder if I'm going to miss my stop" (I saw people occasionally who did indeed miss their stop) you end up building a negative emotional reaction to the experience which lingers even if you successfully conclude the experience. The same, no doubt, happens with software.
(fwiw, I did enjoy my train trip, and I'll probably do something like that again. I am not, however, left with a lot of trust in the Amtrak organization).