ideas worth stealingThe other kind of people
Basement.org’s “Technical Ignorance Is Bliss” is a great reminder that people outside our industry don’t think like we do. They don’t work like we do. And they don’t understand computers like we do.
I tell stories like the ones in the post pretty often, but I’ve never bothered to write them down. I get a lot of great ones from my wife, who teaches computer classes at her library, and I’ve seen quite a few myself. Some highlights:
1) A man who entered his username into his browser’s Address bar wanted to know why he couldn’t access his home computer. He was at the library.
2) A woman held a printed piece of paper up to her monitor and wondered why she couldn’t scan the document.
3) Extremely common: A user enters his email address into the Address bar and wonders why his email won’t open.
4) Also extremely common: A user enters the domain associated with her email address into an Email Address field in a form. Instead of entering an email address, she enters “Yahoo.com”.
These people are not stupid. A lot of the people commonly viewed as idiotic users have Masters degrees, run their own businesses, write books, and so on. They’re all experts in something. They just don’t need to know how computers work they way that we do, so they don’t bother.
And really, why should they?
Keep these people in mind the next time you design … well, anything.
Posted by Robert on November 28th, 2006
3 comments
I used to work for for a nationwide educational company where I would travel all over the country working with teachers and instruct them how to use our software. This software contained a database that would keep track of the students’ progress on the computers via the network.
One time I had a teacher call to say that no matter what she did she could not get the program to work with a wireless network. I troubleshot the issue as much as I could by phone, but finally agreed to an onsite visit.
This school was in El Dorado, Arkansas. For those of you without a map, that is either four hours from Little Rock or five hours from New Orleans. In short, a long way from nowhere.
I had the issue settled a few minutes after arriving.
What was the problem? She didn’t have a wireless network. She had moved the computer away from the Ethernet jack in the wall and thought it still should work because it supported “wireless networking”.
Keep in mind, this was a very educated person with a Masters degree.
People in this category I refer to as “otherwise intelligent”.
As an educator and a computer scientist (my educational focus is on Computer Science Education– CSEd), these types of stories catch my attention not simply as glaring design issues (which they are), but also as interesting poor/missing cognitive models of how computing technologies function.
Any one want to help me re-envision how computers, computing, and information related disciplines are communicated (to students, to the public, to everyone)?!
I started a Backpack page on how to redesign the OS a while back. Can we start there? :)
They are definitely glaring design issues. And on one hand, I’m happy for how far it’s all come. On the other hand, it’s frustrating to continue to see the same types of mistakes made over and over again.
Funny how long it takes to design something simple.