11 ms·

If too many users are wrong, it's probably your fault (2011)

165 points by jcolman 11y ago

exolymph 11y ago
Support work is all about empathy.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Yep and so is programming if you want users to not hate the stuff you write. Something that is easy to say and hard to master, I've been trying for a long time but I think just trying helps.
- meric 11y ago
  Is there a profession besides robbery and looting where empathy isn't helpful?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Prostitution comes to mind.
    - meric 11y ago
      Hmm, I think prostitutes will make more money if they can more successfully attune to their client's feelings. Half of a prostitute's job is to be a therapist, after all.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        They might make more money in the short term, but it is not so good for their psychological well being. Actually any profession where you have to deal with human suffering (say child protection) you need to be able to turn off your empathy. Of course it helps if you can fake it, but if you try to stay empathic you will burn out very quickly. The turnover in these fields is very high for this reason.
        meric 11y ago
        Good point with child protection - it is like but not the same as looting children on behalf of the government, and so is a separate category to looting. ;) Prostitutes can use empathy to build a good long term client relationships. I've read of one who was visited regularly by a client over a couple of years, they went on dates, he bought her flowers and she bought him birthday presents and there was a lot of give-and-take. If that's not empathy enhancing her ability to perform at her profession I don't know what that is.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I think it's empathy compartmentalization, actually.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yup. Prostitutes, and for that matter doctors, need the ability to turn off empathy, as well as a skill in faking it. I have few medical professionals (and a one in training) in my family, so I get to hear some stories from "behind the scenes". Like, you're tired and angry, because your patient is a total moron that did something absurdly stupid and is only wasting hospital's resources, but you have to put on a compassionate face and calm down the patient's family that's freaking out. Or conversely, you're pretty much crying, knowing that the 20-year-old girl that just came in has like, few months to live, and yet you have to put on a smile and tell her that everything's ok. I don't see myself being able to handle that kind of emotional roller coaster day in, day out, and so I'm grateful to those who can.
        meric 11y ago
        You can't fake empathy unless you have the skill of empathy in the first place. Otherwise your fake empathy will be seen through and won't be useful.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I agree. Judging by my personal experiences, I think "faking empathy" is really mostly about compartmentalization - and so it actually is real empathy, but only applied when you chose to. Real skill of empathy is a prerequisite here.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Surgery.
hwaite 11y ago
[Just following instructions...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/just-following-instructions http://thedailywtf.com/articles/just-following-instructions).
- joombaga 11y ago
  Markdown style links (like reddit uses, and like you used above) do not work on Hacker News. There are few options for formatting. [1] Above is an example of how HN users typically link. The "[1]" above will correspond to the first in a list of numbered links at the end of this comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
  - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
    I think the GP might have been making a joke about text formatting on HN.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Possibly as the GP has been member here for a long time, but they have a very low karma so they probably don’t post very often and may be unaware of what works and does not work here. HN is a really interesting UX that appears to be deliberately designed to be difficult for new users to keep the signal to noise high. At least that is my charitable interpretation.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        That is exactly the design decision behind HN's bare-bones design, as said by pg somewhere (I don't remember where, but there's an explicit statement about it).
      - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
        When the responsive'ish design for HN was unveiled by dang some months back, he indicated that this is not actually the case. Whether this was ever the case is a question to which I don't have an answer. At this point, I think it's just tech debt, unfortunately :-\
relaytheurgency 11y ago
Reminds me of when I was teaching and we were discussing test design. If 90% of your students fail your exam what have you learned? I would argue that barring a conspiracy of some kind that the designer has made a mistake in either in the preparation of the exam or the preparation of the students. Others might argue that students may be lazy or aren't maximizing the use of their time. I hear similar arguments about users now that I'm in IT but I've always felt that it is the designer's problem if "no one can use it right."
- exolymph 11y ago
  This was very frustrating to me in school.
- bsder 11y ago
  > If 90% of your students fail your exam what have you learned? It depends if I have corroborating information. Normally, it means that they are lacking some very fundamental piece to their learning. The last class I taught that this happened in had a particularly poor Data Structures teacher and so didn't understand Hashes/Dicts/Associative Lists and how to use them. Yeah, that assignment didn't go well for about 30% of the class. I had to back up and teach that piece. However, my first assignment ALWAYS has 40+% failure rate. And my assignment is: "Here are the directions to: set up Eclipse, set up Mercurial, type in this program, compile it, run it, and check it in so I can run the automated tester on it." I literally give people a document with every single step documented. I'm not joking. We're talking a single print statement that prints "Hello, World!". 40%+ always fail. It's almost invariant. Nothing I do can budge that number. I want to bang my head off the desk at the office hours just before and after that assignment.
  - evincarofautumn 11y ago
    I tutored CS in college and I’ve seen this effect as well. On assignments where literally every step was documented, my students would still often not know what to do, because they had missed something small but crucial. After reading “The Design of Everyday Things”, I’ve come to design things based on the assumption that people don’t read. Even when their sole task is to read, they just don’t. I write compilers, and producing good error messages is a crucial part. But as it turns out, the best predictor of a programmer’s ability to notice and correct an error is not good error-message text—it’s accurate and precise source locations.
danieltillett 11y ago
Just assume your users are illiterate, innumerate, and have a broken mouse that randomly clicks and you will be fine.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nkrisc 11y ago
  While I prefer to frame it with a bit more empathy, essentially, yes. This is correct.
  - rakoo 11y ago
    Said differently, The User Is Drunk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk)
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I am not suggesting that you should think that your users are like this, but that you should design with this type of user in mind. Step back, put on your dunce cap, and fix the problems with your design. This raises a really interesting point which is the cognitive elite are responsible for designing systems with zero empathy for the rest of the population. It is much harder to design a system that anyone can use and most system designers really don’t make the effort.
    - nkrisc 11y ago
      The problem you bring up is very real. Who designs software and websites? People who are very good with computers. Who uses the software and websites? Mostly people who aren't good with computers. I work in a UX role and my yardstick is whether my mom would understand it.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        Great approach - assuming of course that your mother is not a developer :)
dmm 11y ago
> shown that some technical types just don't understand other people. And other people are better? Writing clear instructions that random people can follow is _hard_.
- speeder 11y ago
  I once made a arcade cabinet + game, I wrote on the side of the screen exactly what each button do. when I showed it in public in an event, I saw the same loop many, many times: 1> user press buttons confused, see I am standing nearby, ask me what they do. 2> I do nothing if they have a SO near. 3> SO points user, that there are descriptions of the button right there in front of them. 4> User slaps his forehead. In case there was no SO near, then I would point it myself, the reaction of people was still the same... I concluded that ins't just that people don't follow instructions, is that they don't even try.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    I also think people don't always try to write clear instructions.
  - delish 11y ago
    This is funny and interesting. SO stands for significant other in this case, right? This is happening because the game-player wants to play the game, but the SO is, in a leisurely way, taking it all in?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I actually read a post today that had a similar story about IKEA-like furniture. http://dirtsimple.org/2009/05/how-we-get-stuck.html http://dirtsimple.org/2009/05/how-we-get-stuck.html TL;DR: The author's SO got stuck trying to assemble a kitchen cabinet, and couldn't figure it out. The author looked at the problem, checked with the manual, discovered the solution immediately, and got called smart. The SO didn't even bother. And the author realizes that if their positions were swapped, he wouldn't bother either. There's something wrong with the whole class of people - that mostly seems to coincide with the "non-tech" group, though maybe it's more about problem-solvers/not problem-solvers. What's wrong is that they get stuck on the first obstacle and give up. Instead of assuming that there must be a simple solution and searching for it, they assume it's broken and quit. Also, related, the famous XKCD chart: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/.
matt_wulfeck 11y ago
I've found this very true with CLI tools. Some things just make perfect sense to me but when I try it on a Live Person I see how my assumptions were dumb. Now I try and get in the habit of having people try out CLI tools while I watch. Especially that first run when they have no experience with it is so valuable! The grumbling is also very valuable ("that's a weird name..." "why does is this option different?")
FussyZeus 11y ago
This person is clearly not familiar with the militantly computer ignorant segment of the user base. Yes, there are ways to write instructions to they are better/easier to follow, and yes there are plenty of examples of software that is out there that's just absurdly and unnecessarily hard to use. BUT, there is also a large segment of the user base out there that is willfully ignorant of how computers work and do not want to learn. They want the IT people to come down and do it for them, and they will make it happen no matter how many times they need to bounce back clear and simple directions to the help desk. I'm not saying the author is one (certainly doesn't sound like it) or that it's even a majority, I'm just saying that when I do need to call for tech support, I understand exactly why they tend to act the way they do and don't take it personally. Some people are just rock stupid and some of that group willfully remain so. Does that mean all the elitism around IT people is warranted? Of course not, part of your job as support is working with people who you know, NEED SUPPORT. If you aren't down for that job then you really shouldn't have applied, and you shouldn't be treating everyone like an idiot even when you're pretty sure they are. That's what you're paid to do.
- zenlikethat 11y ago
  Obviously if people are willfully ignorant it's a lost cause. But there are many instances where clandestine technical knowledge becomes "the new normal" for people, and they refuse to have any empathy for users (or fellow developers, perhaps new to the team) that do not deal with the brain-crushing complexity of their niche on a daily basis.
- alsetmusic 11y ago
  Along those lines, I worked in a support position where I learned to just let go when people didn't want to learn. Me: Here's how I fixed it, this takes only one step... User: Oh, this stuff is over my head. I don't want to know. Me: In that case, it was magic. The user ended up finding my boss to commend me for being so easy to work with.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > This person is clearly not familiar with the militantly computer ignorant segment of the user base. The article you're replying to directly contradicts this. He was dealing with militantly ignorant people, made a change to accommodate them, and it worked.
Negitivefrags 11y ago
As a game developer it's very easy to get jaded about user feedback. The more you read it the more you start to feel like the players are ignorant and the game would be better off without them. It's important to remember that any time someone complains, there is a legitimate problem behind it somewhere. The issue is that users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with bad solutions. "Make this monster easier" "Make this item drop more often", etc etc. It's easy to start thinking that if you did what all the players wanted then the game would be entirely bland and give you so many rewards all the time that they become meaningless. The trick is to try and reverse engineer the problems from the solutions that they are giving you, and then come up with good solutions to fix their real problems.
- munchbunny 11y ago
  I'm curious about the games you're making... link? I definitely feel you here. The feedback I see is always about letting the player be more powerful relative to enemies or even other players. This correlates well to the amount of fun a specific player has, but doesn't correlate well at all to how fun the game is for players in general.
  - Negitivefrags 11y ago
    The link is in my profile.
    - munchbunny 11y ago
      Path of Exile! Well, I for one thought your game was quite a worthy entrant to the genre and liked what you did with the various skill and economy systems.
- tempestn 11y ago
  That's a great point, and definitely applies to a more general case than game design. I find the same thing with our web apps. Often the suggestions are ludicrous (make all visited links bright red so I know I've seen them), but the (often unstated) underlying problem is real (on my monitor the visited and unvisited link colours are difficult to distinguish).
Udik 11y ago
I have a nice anecdote to share. Years ago I was in the dev team for the website of a new major mobile operator in Italy. When the first version went to production, there was a wave of sign ups from customers, but in the following days we received a lot of support calls from customers who had signed up but couldn't access their accounts. We started analyzing the problem and noticed two things: 1) the customers who couldn't sign up had used illegal characters in their usernames - there was no validation in place to prevent this: bad mistake; 2) most of these customers, literally hundreds of them, had signed up with usernames containing lots of asterisks. Many usernames looked like lillo* * * * * or bobby* * * * *. I didn't give much weight to this, assuming (wrongly) that it was just a coincidence. Only a guy in my team kept thinking there had to be an explanation, until he nailed it: it was the signup form that said "fill in the fields with asterisk". So we added the damn validation and clarified the copy.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  I've always wanted to scream answers at the self-checkout kiosks that verbally ask if you are bringing your own bags and then make you push on the screen to select Yes or No.
  - thangalin 11y ago
    Out of impatience for text-to-speech systems (easy) to catch up with reliable speech recognition systems (hard)? Or because the system should be more difficult for blind people (or those with speech impediments) to use? ;-)
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
kazinator 11y ago
When people click on example UI images and call support when nothing happens, IT'S THEM. The idea that a lot of people doing the same thing can't be wrong is wrong: yes they can be wrong. The solution which was put in reflects the view that it was them all along. Everything is exactly the same in the UI, except that the subset of the user base which does a silly thing now gets feedback that they are doing a silly thing. No design change has taken place so that fewer (or no) users actually click on the images! If the developer believed that these are intelligent people who have a reasonable mental model of the system, but who are somehow visually fooled by the layout into clicking on inactive elements, then a true design change would have followed. The goal of reducing support calls was achieved, of course.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  The purpose of good UI is to be usable by the target user. If the target user is a blithering moron, then your UI needs to target blithering morons, or else it's bad UI in that context. Ranting about the stupidity of your users is certainly therapeutic, but it doesn't excuse you from serving them and doing your job.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  >The idea that a lot of people doing the same thing can't be wrong is wrong: yes they can be wrong. There's a Danish entertainment that once asked: "The majority always right, or are they just the most (largest group of people)?" I don't buy the logic that if the most people believe something, or can't work something, then they are somehow the ones that get it right.
calhoun137 11y ago
It's not the users fault for being stupid, it's your fault for assuming they are not.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
headShrinker 11y ago
Sorry but this statement and this ideology is flawed. The user isn't right, the user only is good at what they know. Apple or even Ford have proved that when asked, the user wants a faster horse, cause they don't understand the concept of a car. This is the fault of the user not realizing the potential, maybe because of their lack of imagination, or intellect. Or competitors are marketing to id appeals. Users don't think, but they should. Hypothetical Example: dating site users want an ltr with a 6, but are often seduced by the potential for a one night stand with an 8. Users have chosen 8 but the moral ethical and socally acceptable choice is the 6 with the potential for an ltr. The user is wrong but they hooked up and are happy... Is a site that caters to ltr6's wrong? However, too often products have massive flaws that designers should have predicted.
Animats 11y ago
If people are mistaking screenshots for clickable windows, though, that's easy to fix. You can give the screenshots drop shadows, and put scribbled notes on them in another color. Then they don't look like clickable windows. (Amusingly, both of those things have appeared as user interface components, but fell out of style. Apple once had the ability to scribble notes on top of things, and Google was pushing "material design", with lots of raised squares and dropped shadows. (Whatever happened to that, anyway?))

165 points by jcolman 11y ago

exolymph 11y ago

Support work is all about empathy.

noir_lord 11y ago
Yep and so is programming if you want users to not hate the stuff you write. Something that is easy to say and hard to master, I've been trying for a long time but I think just trying helps.
meric 11y ago
Is there a profession besides robbery and looting where empathy isn't helpful?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Prostitution comes to mind.
  - meric 11y ago
    Hmm, I think prostitutes will make more money if they can more successfully attune to their client's feelings. Half of a prostitute's job is to be a therapist, after all.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      They might make more money in the short term, but it is not so good for their psychological well being. Actually any profession where you have to deal with human suffering (say child protection) you need to be able to turn off your empathy. Of course it helps if you can fake it, but if you try to stay empathic you will burn out very quickly. The turnover in these fields is very high for this reason.
      - meric 11y ago
        Good point with child protection - it is like but not the same as looting children on behalf of the government, and so is a separate category to looting. ;) Prostitutes can use empathy to build a good long term client relationships. I've read of one who was visited regularly by a client over a couple of years, they went on dates, he bought her flowers and she bought him birthday presents and there was a lot of give-and-take. If that's not empathy enhancing her ability to perform at her profession I don't know what that is.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I think it's empathy compartmentalization, actually.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yup. Prostitutes, and for that matter doctors, need the ability to turn off empathy, as well as a skill in faking it. I have few medical professionals (and a one in training) in my family, so I get to hear some stories from "behind the scenes". Like, you're tired and angry, because your patient is a total moron that did something absurdly stupid and is only wasting hospital's resources, but you have to put on a compassionate face and calm down the patient's family that's freaking out. Or conversely, you're pretty much crying, knowing that the 20-year-old girl that just came in has like, few months to live, and yet you have to put on a smile and tell her that everything's ok. I don't see myself being able to handle that kind of emotional roller coaster day in, day out, and so I'm grateful to those who can.
        meric 11y ago
        You can't fake empathy unless you have the skill of empathy in the first place. Otherwise your fake empathy will be seen through and won't be useful.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I agree. Judging by my personal experiences, I think "faking empathy" is really mostly about compartmentalization - and so it actually is real empathy, but only applied when you chose to. Real skill of empathy is a prerequisite here.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Surgery.

hwaite 11y ago

[Just following instructions...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/just-following-instructions http://thedailywtf.com/articles/just-following-instructions).

joombaga 11y ago
Markdown style links (like reddit uses, and like you used above) do not work on Hacker News. There are few options for formatting. [1] Above is an example of how HN users typically link. The "[1]" above will correspond to the first in a list of numbered links at the end of this comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  I think the GP might have been making a joke about text formatting on HN.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Possibly as the GP has been member here for a long time, but they have a very low karma so they probably don’t post very often and may be unaware of what works and does not work here. HN is a really interesting UX that appears to be deliberately designed to be difficult for new users to keep the signal to noise high. At least that is my charitable interpretation.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      That is exactly the design decision behind HN's bare-bones design, as said by pg somewhere (I don't remember where, but there's an explicit statement about it).
    - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
      When the responsive'ish design for HN was unveiled by dang some months back, he indicated that this is not actually the case. Whether this was ever the case is a question to which I don't have an answer. At this point, I think it's just tech debt, unfortunately :-\

relaytheurgency 11y ago

Reminds me of when I was teaching and we were discussing test design. If 90% of your students fail your exam what have you learned? I would argue that barring a conspiracy of some kind that the designer has made a mistake in either in the preparation of the exam or the preparation of the students. Others might argue that students may be lazy or aren't maximizing the use of their time. I hear similar arguments about users now that I'm in IT but I've always felt that it is the designer's problem if "no one can use it right."

exolymph 11y ago
This was very frustrating to me in school.
bsder 11y ago
> If 90% of your students fail your exam what have you learned? It depends if I have corroborating information. Normally, it means that they are lacking some very fundamental piece to their learning. The last class I taught that this happened in had a particularly poor Data Structures teacher and so didn't understand Hashes/Dicts/Associative Lists and how to use them. Yeah, that assignment didn't go well for about 30% of the class. I had to back up and teach that piece. However, my first assignment ALWAYS has 40+% failure rate. And my assignment is: "Here are the directions to: set up Eclipse, set up Mercurial, type in this program, compile it, run it, and check it in so I can run the automated tester on it." I literally give people a document with every single step documented. I'm not joking. We're talking a single print statement that prints "Hello, World!". 40%+ always fail. It's almost invariant. Nothing I do can budge that number. I want to bang my head off the desk at the office hours just before and after that assignment.
- evincarofautumn 11y ago
  I tutored CS in college and I’ve seen this effect as well. On assignments where literally every step was documented, my students would still often not know what to do, because they had missed something small but crucial. After reading “The Design of Everyday Things”, I’ve come to design things based on the assumption that people don’t read. Even when their sole task is to read, they just don’t. I write compilers, and producing good error messages is a crucial part. But as it turns out, the best predictor of a programmer’s ability to notice and correct an error is not good error-message text—it’s accurate and precise source locations.

danieltillett 11y ago

Just assume your users are illiterate, innumerate, and have a broken mouse that randomly clicks and you will be fine.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nkrisc 11y ago
While I prefer to frame it with a bit more empathy, essentially, yes. This is correct.
- rakoo 11y ago
  Said differently, The User Is Drunk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk)
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I am not suggesting that you should think that your users are like this, but that you should design with this type of user in mind. Step back, put on your dunce cap, and fix the problems with your design. This raises a really interesting point which is the cognitive elite are responsible for designing systems with zero empathy for the rest of the population. It is much harder to design a system that anyone can use and most system designers really don’t make the effort.
  - nkrisc 11y ago
    The problem you bring up is very real. Who designs software and websites? People who are very good with computers. Who uses the software and websites? Mostly people who aren't good with computers. I work in a UX role and my yardstick is whether my mom would understand it.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Great approach - assuming of course that your mother is not a developer :)

dmm 11y ago

> shown that some technical types just don't understand other people. And other people are better? Writing clear instructions that random people can follow is _hard_.

speeder 11y ago
I once made a arcade cabinet + game, I wrote on the side of the screen exactly what each button do. when I showed it in public in an event, I saw the same loop many, many times: 1> user press buttons confused, see I am standing nearby, ask me what they do. 2> I do nothing if they have a SO near. 3> SO points user, that there are descriptions of the button right there in front of them. 4> User slaps his forehead. In case there was no SO near, then I would point it myself, the reaction of people was still the same... I concluded that ins't just that people don't follow instructions, is that they don't even try.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I also think people don't always try to write clear instructions.
- delish 11y ago
  This is funny and interesting. SO stands for significant other in this case, right? This is happening because the game-player wants to play the game, but the SO is, in a leisurely way, taking it all in?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I actually read a post today that had a similar story about IKEA-like furniture. http://dirtsimple.org/2009/05/how-we-get-stuck.html http://dirtsimple.org/2009/05/how-we-get-stuck.html TL;DR: The author's SO got stuck trying to assemble a kitchen cabinet, and couldn't figure it out. The author looked at the problem, checked with the manual, discovered the solution immediately, and got called smart. The SO didn't even bother. And the author realizes that if their positions were swapped, he wouldn't bother either. There's something wrong with the whole class of people - that mostly seems to coincide with the "non-tech" group, though maybe it's more about problem-solvers/not problem-solvers. What's wrong is that they get stuck on the first obstacle and give up. Instead of assuming that there must be a simple solution and searching for it, they assume it's broken and quit. Also, related, the famous XKCD chart: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/.

matt_wulfeck 11y ago

I've found this very true with CLI tools. Some things just make perfect sense to me but when I try it on a Live Person I see how my assumptions were dumb. Now I try and get in the habit of having people try out CLI tools while I watch. Especially that first run when they have no experience with it is so valuable! The grumbling is also very valuable ("that's a weird name..." "why does is this option different?")

FussyZeus 11y ago

This person is clearly not familiar with the militantly computer ignorant segment of the user base. Yes, there are ways to write instructions to they are better/easier to follow, and yes there are plenty of examples of software that is out there that's just absurdly and unnecessarily hard to use. BUT, there is also a large segment of the user base out there that is willfully ignorant of how computers work and do not want to learn. They want the IT people to come down and do it for them, and they will make it happen no matter how many times they need to bounce back clear and simple directions to the help desk. I'm not saying the author is one (certainly doesn't sound like it) or that it's even a majority, I'm just saying that when I do need to call for tech support, I understand exactly why they tend to act the way they do and don't take it personally. Some people are just rock stupid and some of that group willfully remain so. Does that mean all the elitism around IT people is warranted? Of course not, part of your job as support is working with people who you know, NEED SUPPORT. If you aren't down for that job then you really shouldn't have applied, and you shouldn't be treating everyone like an idiot even when you're pretty sure they are. That's what you're paid to do.

zenlikethat 11y ago
Obviously if people are willfully ignorant it's a lost cause. But there are many instances where clandestine technical knowledge becomes "the new normal" for people, and they refuse to have any empathy for users (or fellow developers, perhaps new to the team) that do not deal with the brain-crushing complexity of their niche on a daily basis.
alsetmusic 11y ago
Along those lines, I worked in a support position where I learned to just let go when people didn't want to learn. Me: Here's how I fixed it, this takes only one step... User: Oh, this stuff is over my head. I don't want to know. Me: In that case, it was magic. The user ended up finding my boss to commend me for being so easy to work with.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> This person is clearly not familiar with the militantly computer ignorant segment of the user base. The article you're replying to directly contradicts this. He was dealing with militantly ignorant people, made a change to accommodate them, and it worked.

Negitivefrags 11y ago

As a game developer it's very easy to get jaded about user feedback. The more you read it the more you start to feel like the players are ignorant and the game would be better off without them. It's important to remember that any time someone complains, there is a legitimate problem behind it somewhere. The issue is that users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with bad solutions. "Make this monster easier" "Make this item drop more often", etc etc. It's easy to start thinking that if you did what all the players wanted then the game would be entirely bland and give you so many rewards all the time that they become meaningless. The trick is to try and reverse engineer the problems from the solutions that they are giving you, and then come up with good solutions to fix their real problems.

munchbunny 11y ago
I'm curious about the games you're making... link? I definitely feel you here. The feedback I see is always about letting the player be more powerful relative to enemies or even other players. This correlates well to the amount of fun a specific player has, but doesn't correlate well at all to how fun the game is for players in general.
- Negitivefrags 11y ago
  The link is in my profile.
  - munchbunny 11y ago
    Path of Exile! Well, I for one thought your game was quite a worthy entrant to the genre and liked what you did with the various skill and economy systems.
tempestn 11y ago
That's a great point, and definitely applies to a more general case than game design. I find the same thing with our web apps. Often the suggestions are ludicrous (make all visited links bright red so I know I've seen them), but the (often unstated) underlying problem is real (on my monitor the visited and unvisited link colours are difficult to distinguish).

Udik 11y ago

I have a nice anecdote to share. Years ago I was in the dev team for the website of a new major mobile operator in Italy. When the first version went to production, there was a wave of sign ups from customers, but in the following days we received a lot of support calls from customers who had signed up but couldn't access their accounts. We started analyzing the problem and noticed two things: 1) the customers who couldn't sign up had used illegal characters in their usernames - there was no validation in place to prevent this: bad mistake; 2) most of these customers, literally hundreds of them, had signed up with usernames containing lots of asterisks. Many usernames looked like lillo* * * * * or bobby* * * * *. I didn't give much weight to this, assuming (wrongly) that it was just a coincidence. Only a guy in my team kept thinking there had to be an explanation, until he nailed it: it was the signup form that said "fill in the fields with asterisk". So we added the damn validation and clarified the copy.

Scoundreller 11y ago
I've always wanted to scream answers at the self-checkout kiosks that verbally ask if you are bringing your own bags and then make you push on the screen to select Yes or No.
- thangalin 11y ago
  Out of impatience for text-to-speech systems (easy) to catch up with reliable speech recognition systems (hard)? Or because the system should be more difficult for blind people (or those with speech impediments) to use? ;-)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

kazinator 11y ago

When people click on example UI images and call support when nothing happens, IT'S THEM. The idea that a lot of people doing the same thing can't be wrong is wrong: yes they can be wrong. The solution which was put in reflects the view that it was them all along. Everything is exactly the same in the UI, except that the subset of the user base which does a silly thing now gets feedback that they are doing a silly thing. No design change has taken place so that fewer (or no) users actually click on the images! If the developer believed that these are intelligent people who have a reasonable mental model of the system, but who are somehow visually fooled by the layout into clicking on inactive elements, then a true design change would have followed. The goal of reducing support calls was achieved, of course.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
The purpose of good UI is to be usable by the target user. If the target user is a blithering moron, then your UI needs to target blithering morons, or else it's bad UI in that context. Ranting about the stupidity of your users is certainly therapeutic, but it doesn't excuse you from serving them and doing your job.
mrweasel 11y ago
>The idea that a lot of people doing the same thing can't be wrong is wrong: yes they can be wrong. There's a Danish entertainment that once asked: "The majority always right, or are they just the most (largest group of people)?" I don't buy the logic that if the most people believe something, or can't work something, then they are somehow the ones that get it right.

calhoun137 11y ago

It's not the users fault for being stupid, it's your fault for assuming they are not.

deleted 11y ago

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headShrinker 11y ago

Sorry but this statement and this ideology is flawed. The user isn't right, the user only is good at what they know. Apple or even Ford have proved that when asked, the user wants a faster horse, cause they don't understand the concept of a car. This is the fault of the user not realizing the potential, maybe because of their lack of imagination, or intellect. Or competitors are marketing to id appeals. Users don't think, but they should. Hypothetical Example: dating site users want an ltr with a 6, but are often seduced by the potential for a one night stand with an 8. Users have chosen 8 but the moral ethical and socally acceptable choice is the 6 with the potential for an ltr. The user is wrong but they hooked up and are happy... Is a site that caters to ltr6's wrong? However, too often products have massive flaws that designers should have predicted.

Animats 11y ago

If people are mistaking screenshots for clickable windows, though, that's easy to fix. You can give the screenshots drop shadows, and put scribbled notes on them in another color. Then they don't look like clickable windows. (Amusingly, both of those things have appeared as user interface components, but fell out of style. Apple once had the ability to scribble notes on top of things, and Google was pushing "material design", with lots of raised squares and dropped shadows. (Whatever happened to that, anyway?))