7 ms·

A wonderful example of this is people who type URLs into Google Search or search queries into address bar (before most browsers had Omnibar-like features). To a

by chime 15y ago

A wonderful example of this is people who type URLs into Google Search or search queries into address bar (before most browsers had Omnibar-like features). To all of us here, it clearly makes sense that the browser is a local software that enables you to visit websites while a search engine is a website that finds other websites. Typing a full URL in Google is generally a waste of bandwidth and time. This abstraction of service is lost on many users who see the browser and search engine as the same thing. And even different websites and the Internet as the same thing. I've had to field many tech-support calls because a Java exception occurred on the outsourced Payroll processing site but somehow since I manage the IT Department, clearly it is something I could fix. I think a good way to look at this is to pick something complex that you use regularly but don't know much about, like an automobile or cellphone hardware. Why does my cellphone suddenly lose reception for 5 seconds when walking under my carport? I have no clue but I suspect it has something to do with the signal or maybe because there's a lot of metal around. That is how users feel when you show them a big red X, regardless of how much descriptive text you present. Best is to avoid situations where you have to show X and just make it easy to revert to the previous situation.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
simondlr 15y ago
Agreed. It reminds me of the Facebook RWW login fail. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo.... To us, this was hilarious, but it painted a picture of how unintuitive the browser abstraction is to some.
saurik 15y ago
While I largely agree with your comment, I think the story of you and your cell phone differs from that of the user who calls you asking to fix the website, in that you know that you do not know what is causing the signal to degrade. I have nearly infinite patience and can completely understand someone coming to me with the following: "hey, I have no clue what just happened, and you probably aren't even the right person to ask this question anyway, but I figured that you might at least be able to give me a better understanding of what went wrong if not: I tried to access my payroll today, and it didn't work; is that something you can fix?" That is the kind of message I have myself sent on occasion when I'm "in over my head" in a field I don't understand, and have run into issues that block progress. However, the kind of message I get on a daily basis is: "you are a piece of work: I should report you and your organization to the police. how dare you have given me this error message! I demand that you fix this situation in the next 24 hours or I am going to go on Twitter and Facebook and make it clear to everyone what kind of crook you are." (Meanwhile, they are complaining to me that... their bank account is out of money... and the error message came from PayPal. I even get users complaining to me that my software took a $35 fee from their account because of their lack of funds, which is obviously an overdraft fee from their greedy bank, and has nothing to do with any of the software in the stack that is billing them.) This person believes that they know the things that they in fact don't know (or possibly isn't even able to contemplate that there might be something that they don't know about the situation) and so is willing to go in with "all guns blazing" against that one entity they seem to believe is in charge of everything. I am honestly not certain who is to blame for that: poor schooling, bad genetics, developers who believe software should be "intuitive" (and thereby put the moral equivalent of a cartoon-laden control panel that anyone could believe they could operate on what should have been a very scary buzzsaw in a woodshop)... the cause of this phenomenon is clearly in my "I know that I do not know this" region. Whatever it is, though, it is simply not fair to state that you, in an analogous situation of being quite far and even fundamentally outside your competence, would act similarly to these confused users; I just don't buy it.
- shabble 15y ago
  I've found that the tone of the message is often an indication of what the sender thinks it will achieve. The all-guns-blazing "How dare you do this to me?!" is intended to get an immediate apology and admission of guilt, with the probable end goal being a free or discounted service. People who immediately threaten to "go public" with their experience without first trying to resolve it are kind of banking on that sort of response, IME. It's the internet equivalent to "making a scene" at the customer support desk. It might be just personal experience, but the most foaming-at-the-mouth also seem to be those who maybe realise or suspect they might be personally be at fault, and are writing to reassure themselves as much as blame you. Those who genuinely don't understand will often to go great lengths to indicate that they've tried, sometimes with speculation on what they might have done or where the problem might be. Pretty much everyone will occasionally vent their anger at some public contact point of an organisation they're having problems with though, especially if there's external pressure (bank charges, missing SO's birthday delivery, or whatever) on top. The impersonality of email doesn't really help, although anyone who's worked phones or retail knows that some people will rage anywhere.
  - saurik 15y ago
    That's an interesting strategy (attempting to enrage those whose help you are asking): for my part I can say with utter certainly that I bend over backwards to help people who send me the kind requests, and stick to "no, we do not offer that service" for anyone who skirts the "this is making my day unpleasant, I would rather be doing anything but this e-mail" category. :( However, I am concerned that now in having worded the two responses along the kind/mean access, I have also ruined them as examples of the thing I was actually hoping to demonstrate. I also get perfectly nice requests from people who still believe that I can help them. I got an incredibly kind e-mail today, for example, from someone asking me to remove software they had previously posted to Cydia (as they were now selling something similar somewhere and didn't want the free version to undercut them). This request was all-sorts-of-hedged against things that didn't even matter, such as that they had released it under CC and therefore knew I was not legally required to do so, and that they knew I was busy working on other things they appreciated, and that maybe we simply never removed things at all, etc. etc.. However, the real core of the issue is that I do not host their package at all, nor was I even the person they had originally given the package to: they needed to contact the site they were hosting the package with (as Cydia is pretty much just a web browser of third-party content), a repository I happened to know would honor the request immediately. I was in a similar situation to this recently: I was trying to register my company for physical sales taxes in my county, and figured I needed to contact someone somewhere at the town hall, county center, what-have-you. I went to each of these places, and stated "I am not certain if you are even the person who would be in charge of this, but maybe you will be able to direct me to where I should go" before asking them my question. I personally believe that that difference is important: I knew that I didn't really know whether what I was doing made any sense, and that I was honest with the people whom I was interacting with that I had no clue about anything related to selling physical products. I feel like, once you admit that to yourself it becomes much easier to problem solve and work your way into a state of "knowing": in these cases, maybe asking yourself "is this in fact the person I should contact? why am I choosing to contact this person? will I make that person feel awkward if I assume they are in charge of something they are not? who else might I contact in addition to or instead of them?". I might then go even further and posit that the people who are trying to "reassure themselves" that I or you are to blame are in essence somehow feeling that "not knowing" something makes them powerless somehow, and that they therefore need to be overly confident to "reassure themselves" that they in fact know what is happening. So, interesting: thanks for responding to my comment! I will think about this more (as I continue to drudge through the last week of hate-mail, which I've been doing ever since I woke up). ;P
jes5199 15y ago
I've only been using Chrome for a couple years, but when I try to use Firefox or Safari now, I inevitably start typing searches into the address bar. Every. Single. Time. I don't think I'll ever be able to use a browser with two text-entry fields again.
- Zirro 15y ago
  You know, searching from the location bar in Firefox has worked for a couple of years now. I use both fields, depending on what I'm currently doing.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    You could even change the search engine from Google to something else if you want. It's a field in about:config called 'keyword.URL'. I haven't even needed the dedicated search bar since I switched to DuckDuckGo thanks to the !bang commands. :)

by chime 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

simondlr 15y ago

Agreed. It reminds me of the Facebook RWW login fail. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo.... To us, this was hilarious, but it painted a picture of how unintuitive the browser abstraction is to some.

saurik 15y ago

While I largely agree with your comment, I think the story of you and your cell phone differs from that of the user who calls you asking to fix the website, in that you know that you do not know what is causing the signal to degrade. I have nearly infinite patience and can completely understand someone coming to me with the following: "hey, I have no clue what just happened, and you probably aren't even the right person to ask this question anyway, but I figured that you might at least be able to give me a better understanding of what went wrong if not: I tried to access my payroll today, and it didn't work; is that something you can fix?" That is the kind of message I have myself sent on occasion when I'm "in over my head" in a field I don't understand, and have run into issues that block progress. However, the kind of message I get on a daily basis is: "you are a piece of work: I should report you and your organization to the police. how dare you have given me this error message! I demand that you fix this situation in the next 24 hours or I am going to go on Twitter and Facebook and make it clear to everyone what kind of crook you are." (Meanwhile, they are complaining to me that... their bank account is out of money... and the error message came from PayPal. I even get users complaining to me that my software took a $35 fee from their account because of their lack of funds, which is obviously an overdraft fee from their greedy bank, and has nothing to do with any of the software in the stack that is billing them.) This person believes that they know the things that they in fact don't know (or possibly isn't even able to contemplate that there might be something that they don't know about the situation) and so is willing to go in with "all guns blazing" against that one entity they seem to believe is in charge of everything. I am honestly not certain who is to blame for that: poor schooling, bad genetics, developers who believe software should be "intuitive" (and thereby put the moral equivalent of a cartoon-laden control panel that anyone could believe they could operate on what should have been a very scary buzzsaw in a woodshop)... the cause of this phenomenon is clearly in my "I know that I do not know this" region. Whatever it is, though, it is simply not fair to state that you, in an analogous situation of being quite far and even fundamentally outside your competence, would act similarly to these confused users; I just don't buy it.

shabble 15y ago
I've found that the tone of the message is often an indication of what the sender thinks it will achieve. The all-guns-blazing "How dare you do this to me?!" is intended to get an immediate apology and admission of guilt, with the probable end goal being a free or discounted service. People who immediately threaten to "go public" with their experience without first trying to resolve it are kind of banking on that sort of response, IME. It's the internet equivalent to "making a scene" at the customer support desk. It might be just personal experience, but the most foaming-at-the-mouth also seem to be those who maybe realise or suspect they might be personally be at fault, and are writing to reassure themselves as much as blame you. Those who genuinely don't understand will often to go great lengths to indicate that they've tried, sometimes with speculation on what they might have done or where the problem might be. Pretty much everyone will occasionally vent their anger at some public contact point of an organisation they're having problems with though, especially if there's external pressure (bank charges, missing SO's birthday delivery, or whatever) on top. The impersonality of email doesn't really help, although anyone who's worked phones or retail knows that some people will rage anywhere.
- saurik 15y ago
  That's an interesting strategy (attempting to enrage those whose help you are asking): for my part I can say with utter certainly that I bend over backwards to help people who send me the kind requests, and stick to "no, we do not offer that service" for anyone who skirts the "this is making my day unpleasant, I would rather be doing anything but this e-mail" category. :( However, I am concerned that now in having worded the two responses along the kind/mean access, I have also ruined them as examples of the thing I was actually hoping to demonstrate. I also get perfectly nice requests from people who still believe that I can help them. I got an incredibly kind e-mail today, for example, from someone asking me to remove software they had previously posted to Cydia (as they were now selling something similar somewhere and didn't want the free version to undercut them). This request was all-sorts-of-hedged against things that didn't even matter, such as that they had released it under CC and therefore knew I was not legally required to do so, and that they knew I was busy working on other things they appreciated, and that maybe we simply never removed things at all, etc. etc.. However, the real core of the issue is that I do not host their package at all, nor was I even the person they had originally given the package to: they needed to contact the site they were hosting the package with (as Cydia is pretty much just a web browser of third-party content), a repository I happened to know would honor the request immediately. I was in a similar situation to this recently: I was trying to register my company for physical sales taxes in my county, and figured I needed to contact someone somewhere at the town hall, county center, what-have-you. I went to each of these places, and stated "I am not certain if you are even the person who would be in charge of this, but maybe you will be able to direct me to where I should go" before asking them my question. I personally believe that that difference is important: I knew that I didn't really know whether what I was doing made any sense, and that I was honest with the people whom I was interacting with that I had no clue about anything related to selling physical products. I feel like, once you admit that to yourself it becomes much easier to problem solve and work your way into a state of "knowing": in these cases, maybe asking yourself "is this in fact the person I should contact? why am I choosing to contact this person? will I make that person feel awkward if I assume they are in charge of something they are not? who else might I contact in addition to or instead of them?". I might then go even further and posit that the people who are trying to "reassure themselves" that I or you are to blame are in essence somehow feeling that "not knowing" something makes them powerless somehow, and that they therefore need to be overly confident to "reassure themselves" that they in fact know what is happening. So, interesting: thanks for responding to my comment! I will think about this more (as I continue to drudge through the last week of hate-mail, which I've been doing ever since I woke up). ;P

jes5199 15y ago

I've only been using Chrome for a couple years, but when I try to use Firefox or Safari now, I inevitably start typing searches into the address bar. Every. Single. Time. I don't think I'll ever be able to use a browser with two text-entry fields again.

Zirro 15y ago
You know, searching from the location bar in Firefox has worked for a couple of years now. I use both fields, depending on what I'm currently doing.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  You could even change the search engine from Google to something else if you want. It's a field in about:config called 'keyword.URL'. I haven't even needed the dedicated search bar since I switched to DuckDuckGo thanks to the !bang commands. :)