Thread by @ip1

Crazy IRL story time: Decades ago now, there was a senior division director who wasn't really "impressed" by computer but was being forced to use one. He had a desk with years and years of paper stacked all over it.

The computer monitor was perched precariously on top of one of those stacks, and the keyboard on another, but in those days the mouse was the original IBM PS/2 roller ball style, so you needed a clear surface to operate it on

So on this HUGE desk piled high with paper, there was a clear strip that ran from one side of the desk to the other.

I asked him why he had this weird cleared area...

"I needed more space because I couldn't get my mouse pointer to the stuff on the edges of the screen"

He never realised that you could move the mouse a bit, pick it up and put it down and keep moving it if you don't have enough space.

It was then that I realised that it is important to know that what we think is intuitive may not actually be so when we expect people outside of our experiences to use this technology.

Apple did this really well (in the beginning)

So I'm sure we all have "dumb user" stories, but have a think about how those events came about. Don't roll your eyes and assume they are stupid, ask yourself what can be done to make it more obvious how a thing should be used correctly.

Yes, the story of the user who fed multiple floppy disks into the drive without knowing they needed to take the previous one out first. (Insert disk 3/10)

Yes the user holding a piece of paper to the monitor to "scan" it

The user taking a photocopy of their laptop screen

It's not to say these things aren't funny (they are), but if you encounter these types of things in real life, just remember not everyone has developed your intuitions about technology, so it may not have occurred to them that there is another/better way.

Some further thoughts:

"Users" aren't just the non-tech literate people in your family and workplace. It is also *you*

Someone who lives and breathes a product or solution will come to know that product instinctively, usually to the point that they don't even notice the quirks

When talking to other tech literate people, there might be an assumption that another tech person will understand everything at the same level, but this is a bad assumption.

For the most part I figure I'm a fairly smart and tech-literate person, but there are things I encounter everyday that totally stump me. I will eventually work it out, but for the life of me I can't see an obvious solution or reason why a thing was done the way it was

In these cases it is likely that a small idea was formed in the product devs mind and coded up. It worked ok, but was then expanded on, enhanced, developed further. To the person writing the code this iterative growth allowed them time to "normalise" the whole thing in their head

It all works, it all makes sense, so RELEASE!

Then when someone like me sees it, I don't have the advantage of having grown up with this from its infancy, I'm presented with the end product and there is an assumption that it is obvious what needs to happen

When something is presented with a simple functional interface, in most cases it doesn't matter how complex the backend is. You are given a box to tick or not tick. Easy, intuitive.

But when something needs a bit more knowledge to configure...

That "thing" that the developer created to resolve a particular problem or solution probably made sense to them at the time and they had time to get used to the concept, but when presented as a total blob of product, it can be daunting and confusing.

Anyone who visits the Microsoft technet or Reddit groups on tech stuff will see this first hand. It's easy to laugh and what appears to be a really dumb question, but it is also important to stop and think about the reason why this question came about. Tech people are users too.

We make jokes like RTFM, but also ask why they haven't. Are the instructions too complicated? Are they hard to find in the first place?

We were all noobs once, we are all still noobs at a lot of things.

So yes it's OK to laugh, but make sure you follow up with an explanation.

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