ideas worth stealingThe Savviness Paradox
“As users get more and more savvy on the web …”
This statement is thrown around a lot in web developer circles. And it make me cringe every time. It implies that an entire culture is capable of becoming savvier on the web simply because the web has existed for a longer period of time now than it did a year ago.
Here’s the truth. Users don’t get savvier unless the technology gets easier.
The fact is, most people don’t ever get past an intermediate level of, well, anything. It’s extremely rare that we become experts at using a particular web application, or the web in general. More and more people are able to use the web (at least somewhat) effectively now because web designers continually get better at making things work well, instead of relying on users to magically become “savvier”.
A brick-and-mortar analogy:
No one wants to have to become an expert grocery shopper. Because of this, we’re not becoming expert grocery shoppers. We have better things to do - better things to be experts on.
Instead, grocery stores are being redesigned left and right to make things easier. Signs are redesigned to be clearer. Merchandise is reorganized to make it easier to find. Store maps are redesigned to improve the flow from one type of product to the next. There’s a lot of science behind the design of a grocery store. They’re not getting more complex because we’ve become savvier grocery shoppers. They’re getting easier so that more people are encouraged to buy more and have a more enjoyable experience.
For some reason, when it comes to the web, lots of people seem to think users are getting savvier and can therefore handle more complicated interactions.
Individuals can certainly become savvier, but what’s important is not that they get savvier, it’s how they get savvier. They do this by learning patterns and applying knowledge from one experience to another. And designers enable this by leveraging design patterns, building on them, and making it possible for people to apply knowledge from one experience to the next.
If you want savvier users, give them something that helps them become savvy.
Posted by Robert on August 30th, 2007
3 comments
Interesting, but I don’t really agree. Your first few times at a new grocery store, you’re *not* savvy. But then you learn the layout, even if you don’t think anything’s changed, and it gets a lot easier. You’ve gotten, as you say, “intermediate”.
Why wouldn’t you think this happens on the web? Some of it is definitely that the web is getting better, but a lot of it is just that people have gotten beyond the basics. It happens with any activity - I’ve also been thinking about driving recently, how much better one drives after a few years of driving, versus when one first starts. Again, independent of whether the car gets better or not.
The people who usually throw around “As users get more and more savvy on the web …” do it to justify the addition of expert-level features. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t presume that web users - en masse - are getting savvier, because they’re not.
Of course users get savvier - they turn from beignners to intermediates - but not nearly as savvy as people usually think.
Your driving analogy is interesting, but not really a one-for-one comparison. You can drive for 20 years and get better at driving - sure - but you can still know almost nothing about how the engine works, and you may be nowhere becoming a race car driver. This is the kind of logic I’m talking about.
I agree that there is a lot of assumptions being made about the technical ability of users, as far as I am concerned, it is down to lazy short-sightedness - hey, I can work it out, why can’t they?
This lack of foresight then leads to bad design in the whole industry, designers who are too concerned with adding the latest buzzword framework (subtext, AJAX) before even considering how the user will get from A to B without suffering a content-induced brain haemorrhage.
Case in point, my Mother in Law. Lovely person, clever, above average IQ and posesses that cruicial ability to solve the most complex sudoku puzzles known to man. Plonk a computer in front of her and all that goes away, even the use of a practically idiot-proof mp3 player becomes a chore. Things need spelling out to her. Give her a few minutes, and she’ll be clicking away like a woman posessed.
I maintain a relatively complicated online form, and I have learnt big lessons with this. My collegue designed this form with the assumption that the user will ‘just figure it out’. Not correct. Everything that requires user input, needs to go through the Krypton Factor-esque process that is Idiot Proofing. If you think it is a little bit unspecific, or wooly, or complicated, then it most probably is.