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Yes, users are fucking dumb. I use to work help desk for a number of years, and the stories I could tell... Though, I sorta object to treating them all like th

Yes, users are fucking dumb. I use to work help desk for a number of years, and the stories I could tell... Though, I sorta object to treating them all like their stupid. There are stupid users, and then there are users that are stupid because you treat them like they are. Let me explain. When I worked in healthcare I was pretty stupid. It wasn't that I didn't understand the mechanics behind it, but it just didn't click with me because the training I had was deplorable. I was regularly yelled at for making mistakes, and didn't have a really supportive environment. So in my haste to ensure I did everything quickly, and didn't make any mistakes it actually caused me to either overthink or underthink certain steps due to anxiety and nervousness. So in other words, when someone started treating me like I was stupid I was more prone to acting like I was stupid... So when I worked at help desk no matter how stupid a users was I always did my best to treat them as kindly as possible. In the end what wound up happening is that I wound up getting much better results than my coworkers who wouldn't treat them respectfully. That wasn't even my super weapon though. It was anticipation of future problems... I always really liked Roman Mars perspective on design. Good design is effortless. When you go through a door if there is a handle on it and you pull that handle you feel stupid when you see that it says pull only. So in my own way I am always trying to view things I do in IT, whether programming or helpdesk from a user centric perspective. If I think ahead of time about what sort of potential issue someone would have, and I can change something to prevent that then I have much better results. This is something I see being a problem all up and down the entire stack in IT. It is time to stop treating our users like idiots. But it’s also time to start returning to idiot proof design.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Yes, users are fucking dumb. I use to work help desk for a number of years, and the stories I could tell... That sounds like textbook selection bias; users will usually end up at helpdesk only when they're out of their depth.
- liability 6y ago
  Exactly. Users rarely if ever go to tech support to show off things they figured out themselves. Tech support pros saying users are all dumb is like brain surgeons saying everybody has brain damage.
- bluedays 6y ago
  I see your point, but I dealt with users far more often than just whenever they needed tech support. Interactions with users were more common in my position than just when they needed help. I provisioned all the computers for the company I worked for. I also upgraded any software, usually manually for whatever reason, and dealt with a lot of the day to day maintenance. Like I said, users are not universally stupid, but when they are they can be especially stupid. A lot of it could be mitigated with better design. A lot of it could be mitigated by critical thinking on behalf of the users.
lexicality 6y ago
> when I worked at help desk no matter how stupid a users was I always did my best to treat them as kindly as possible. This resonates with me because it's something I try to do all the time. The XKCD "Ten Thousand" comic[0] really spoke to me and ever since reading it I've tried to treat people as 'temporarily inconvenienced geniuses' rather than morons when they ask me for help and it seems to work wonders. If you enter requests for help with the mindset of "let me show you how to solve your problem" and not "let me solve your problem" you end up speaking to people as if they are an equal which always seems to provoke better responses Of course the reward for being good at digging holes is more holes and to coin a malaphor if you teach a man to fish he'll come annoy you every time his boat won't start, but it's also pretty nice to be the person everyone assumes can fix anything. (Also it's a great outlet for the typically annoying desire to solve everyone's problems) [0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- bluedays 6y ago
  One of the things that I have discovered is that treating people in this way can be a bit of a double edged sword though. When I was working at my last company I was on a team of three, and I wound up being the guy that dealt with all of the difficult users. That was fine by me though, because I had previously also worked in a group home with individuals with developmental disabilities, and emotional problems so a difficult user to me was just whatever. But... I can see how it might negatively effect someone else. lol But! On the other hand, if I ever needed something it wasn't that hard to get someone to help me. Kindness in my experience has always multiplied. There is, as you said, always something that someone doesn't know, including yourself. So there was always something that the users were willing to teach me in return. PS. I love this comic. When I am finally done going to school maybe I'll hang that in my cubicle or something. I estimate with all of the programming I have done for college, and all of my personal time on side projects that when I am finally ready to get back into IT again I'll end up being stuck in help desk again, anyway...
  - lexicality 6y ago
    > So there was always something that the users were willing to teach me in return. This is very true and why I love mentoring people. Once you have shared knowledge with someone, they usually want to return the favour and you can learn a lot from that. > I love this comic. When I am finally done going to school maybe I'll hang that in my cubicle or something. Nice! Prior to that comic I had Hanlon's razor in a frame above my desk which uh, while a good sentiment isn't the most positive mindset.
ehnto 6y ago
Computers can be really frustrating to use, the biggest offender in my opinion is hidden state. So many programs don't mention something has changed, and so if you fumble a click or a shortcut you can end up in a program state you didn't want to be in and may not even realise it until something goes wrong. You wouldn't accidentally hit a switch on your car and now you can only go left, with no indication on why that is, and no transitional information given during the switch. Yet programs and websites will happily modify the state without so much as a brief text flash asaying "Oh hey, you're in Paint Only Mode now" for example. My absolute favorite way to deal with this is small status indicators in some kind of toolbar, that when I hover over it, it gives me a tooltip on what it is and how to toggle it. Accidentally hit debug mode? No worries, a little debug symbol just flashed briefly, I can go look for it in the toolbar and hover over it to figure it out.
- oblio 6y ago
  > Computers can be really frustrating to use, the biggest offender in my opinion is hidden state. So many programs don't mention something has changed, and so if you fumble a click or a shortcut you can end up in a program state you didn't want to be in and may not even realise it until something goes wrong. There is a high degree of irony to this when you think about the extremely popular Unix philosophy, which is kind of the antithesis to what you're saying. I know that it's meant for power users, but even for those in many cases it's still bad UX.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Isn't Unix philosophy the one about small, focused tools that compose well? It fits the GP's view, since the composition is meant to be user-driven, explicit and visible. (Also composability usually implies lack of hidden state - in Unix-land, state issue may just come from the baggage of C language.)
    - oblio 6y ago
      Yeah, but all those tools by default don't print anything if they run successfully, which is indistinguishable from silent failure. If you look at all modern tools, this approach has been abandoned, especially for long running operations, since it's obviously bad UX.
valuearb 6y ago
I agree with a lot of things you say, but I think that “lack domain knowledge” is a better description than “stupid”. There are many people who have little interest in the underlying “how” and “why” of computers work. They haven’t been educated, more importantly they don’t want to be educated. They want to focus their time and energies on (What they regard as) more important things. I have two bright teenage girls who need to use computers every day to get school work done. But their focus is art and reading, and writing. Their eyes gaze over whenever I try to explain why their computer is behaving the way it is. My eldest did an amazing project in just a couple hours the first time she ever used Photoshop, removed a person imperceptibly from a old scanned image, realigned it to be upright from a mislaid scan, recolored it to make it look present day without oversaturating it. Most of this she learned from in app tutorials. But I had to show her how to save the file and explain file formats and the difference between cloud and local storage. She just didn’t care about that part any more than she needed to turn the assignment on. But how to use Photoshop is like another form of sketching or painting, so she ate those tutorials up like chiclets.
- afarrell 6y ago
  True. Yet how often do you ask a waiter about the challenges of scheduling the maintenance of a commercial refrigerator?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> Yes, users are fucking dumb. I use to work help desk for a number of years, and the stories I could tell... That sounds like textbook selection bias; users will usually end up at helpdesk only when they're out of their depth.

liability 6y ago
Exactly. Users rarely if ever go to tech support to show off things they figured out themselves. Tech support pros saying users are all dumb is like brain surgeons saying everybody has brain damage.
bluedays 6y ago
I see your point, but I dealt with users far more often than just whenever they needed tech support. Interactions with users were more common in my position than just when they needed help. I provisioned all the computers for the company I worked for. I also upgraded any software, usually manually for whatever reason, and dealt with a lot of the day to day maintenance. Like I said, users are not universally stupid, but when they are they can be especially stupid. A lot of it could be mitigated with better design. A lot of it could be mitigated by critical thinking on behalf of the users.

lexicality 6y ago

> when I worked at help desk no matter how stupid a users was I always did my best to treat them as kindly as possible. This resonates with me because it's something I try to do all the time. The XKCD "Ten Thousand" comic[0] really spoke to me and ever since reading it I've tried to treat people as 'temporarily inconvenienced geniuses' rather than morons when they ask me for help and it seems to work wonders. If you enter requests for help with the mindset of "let me show you how to solve your problem" and not "let me solve your problem" you end up speaking to people as if they are an equal which always seems to provoke better responses Of course the reward for being good at digging holes is more holes and to coin a malaphor if you teach a man to fish he'll come annoy you every time his boat won't start, but it's also pretty nice to be the person everyone assumes can fix anything. (Also it's a great outlet for the typically annoying desire to solve everyone's problems) [0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

bluedays 6y ago
One of the things that I have discovered is that treating people in this way can be a bit of a double edged sword though. When I was working at my last company I was on a team of three, and I wound up being the guy that dealt with all of the difficult users. That was fine by me though, because I had previously also worked in a group home with individuals with developmental disabilities, and emotional problems so a difficult user to me was just whatever. But... I can see how it might negatively effect someone else. lol But! On the other hand, if I ever needed something it wasn't that hard to get someone to help me. Kindness in my experience has always multiplied. There is, as you said, always something that someone doesn't know, including yourself. So there was always something that the users were willing to teach me in return. PS. I love this comic. When I am finally done going to school maybe I'll hang that in my cubicle or something. I estimate with all of the programming I have done for college, and all of my personal time on side projects that when I am finally ready to get back into IT again I'll end up being stuck in help desk again, anyway...
- lexicality 6y ago
  > So there was always something that the users were willing to teach me in return. This is very true and why I love mentoring people. Once you have shared knowledge with someone, they usually want to return the favour and you can learn a lot from that. > I love this comic. When I am finally done going to school maybe I'll hang that in my cubicle or something. Nice! Prior to that comic I had Hanlon's razor in a frame above my desk which uh, while a good sentiment isn't the most positive mindset.

ehnto 6y ago

Computers can be really frustrating to use, the biggest offender in my opinion is hidden state. So many programs don't mention something has changed, and so if you fumble a click or a shortcut you can end up in a program state you didn't want to be in and may not even realise it until something goes wrong. You wouldn't accidentally hit a switch on your car and now you can only go left, with no indication on why that is, and no transitional information given during the switch. Yet programs and websites will happily modify the state without so much as a brief text flash asaying "Oh hey, you're in Paint Only Mode now" for example. My absolute favorite way to deal with this is small status indicators in some kind of toolbar, that when I hover over it, it gives me a tooltip on what it is and how to toggle it. Accidentally hit debug mode? No worries, a little debug symbol just flashed briefly, I can go look for it in the toolbar and hover over it to figure it out.

oblio 6y ago
> Computers can be really frustrating to use, the biggest offender in my opinion is hidden state. So many programs don't mention something has changed, and so if you fumble a click or a shortcut you can end up in a program state you didn't want to be in and may not even realise it until something goes wrong. There is a high degree of irony to this when you think about the extremely popular Unix philosophy, which is kind of the antithesis to what you're saying. I know that it's meant for power users, but even for those in many cases it's still bad UX.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Isn't Unix philosophy the one about small, focused tools that compose well? It fits the GP's view, since the composition is meant to be user-driven, explicit and visible. (Also composability usually implies lack of hidden state - in Unix-land, state issue may just come from the baggage of C language.)
  - oblio 6y ago
    Yeah, but all those tools by default don't print anything if they run successfully, which is indistinguishable from silent failure. If you look at all modern tools, this approach has been abandoned, especially for long running operations, since it's obviously bad UX.

valuearb 6y ago

I agree with a lot of things you say, but I think that “lack domain knowledge” is a better description than “stupid”. There are many people who have little interest in the underlying “how” and “why” of computers work. They haven’t been educated, more importantly they don’t want to be educated. They want to focus their time and energies on (What they regard as) more important things. I have two bright teenage girls who need to use computers every day to get school work done. But their focus is art and reading, and writing. Their eyes gaze over whenever I try to explain why their computer is behaving the way it is. My eldest did an amazing project in just a couple hours the first time she ever used Photoshop, removed a person imperceptibly from a old scanned image, realigned it to be upright from a mislaid scan, recolored it to make it look present day without oversaturating it. Most of this she learned from in app tutorials. But I had to show her how to save the file and explain file formats and the difference between cloud and local storage. She just didn’t care about that part any more than she needed to turn the assignment on. But how to use Photoshop is like another form of sketching or painting, so she ate those tutorials up like chiclets.

afarrell 6y ago
True. Yet how often do you ask a waiter about the challenges of scheduling the maintenance of a commercial refrigerator?