A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. From an app point of view you can count yourself lucky if you get even 10% of their attention at any given time.
Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it.
That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar. They are thinking about how to address that new prospective customer.
That person in Excel isn't thinking about cells either. They are thinking about whether Robin in R&D is going to get the figures for Q2 to them in time.
Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI.
The side effect of being busy and distracted is that they're extremely thrifty with their attention, and sometimes their split-second subconscious decision not to look closely at something gets locked in and not reevaluated. About 70% of the IT support I do for my family goes like this:
Voice from the next room: "Can you help me, dkarl? The computer won't save my document."
Me, comfy in my chair: "What does it say?"
"It's doing something weird."
"Weird how? What does it say?"
"I don't know, I was just saving like I always do, and now there's this window and it wants me to do something."
"What is it asking you to do?"
"It wants me to click something? I don't know, maybe it wants a password or it's not going to do it because of iCloud or something? It's been weird lately."
"Okay. What are the words in the window where it wants you to click something?"
"It says... oh, it says there's another file with this name already."
"Okay, do you want me to come over there and help you find the other file and see what's in it?"
"No, I can do it. Thank you!"
I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face.
> A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted.
I'd put it differently. Realize that your app is not the center of the world. Your users have things to do, and using your app is a small fraction of their life. Even though it might be your baby and you might be spending all of your waking ours thinking about your app, user perspective is different.
>A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted
but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person.
You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.
You really can't bucket your users on a single mental model. It depends entirely on application and usage patterns. Daily users will become experts pretty quickly and look for fast, simple design. Doubly so if it's a line of business application with a captive audience (like a POS interface). Something like my homeowner insurance is a site I log in to like once a year. I'm not ever going to even remember my password let alone how to do anything without giant, colorful buttons leading me along. This is why UX is a profession.
The seminal work on interaction design isn't Don't Make Me Think, it's About Face. About Face makes thee general rule that you should not design for beginners or experts but for the perpetual intermediate.
I can see how this breeds resentment in some contexts, though.
A developer might spend a huge amount of time and effort modeling a workflow or a process into something crisp enough for a machine to process. That might take months of what feels like pulling teeth from people to extract requirements - people who are supposed to be domain experts. By the time he's done, he probably understands everything better than the people whose job it is to use the tool - the tool that now enables them to ignore and forget about parts of their job and complete it with 10% of their attention.
"Stupid users - they barely understand their own job and I spent months learning the finest details about it to build them a tool so they can keep doing it without understanding it at all."
Not saying it's right, but I can see how it happens.
>> Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it.
Yep. It's probably over used as an example, but I always come back to pinch-zoom. People don't care about your UI, the best you can let them do is directly manipulate their data. Anything else is a compromise. That compromise is always going to be there, but we need to minimize it.
MS Office has turned into a sort of industrial machine with a control panel. You can do anything to your data if you know what sequence of buttons to push to tell the machine what to do. Actually that peaked several years ago and they have been getting better about more direct access to features. OTOH they also have so much functionality that such UI will never go away completely.
On a related tangent, I feel like tools for programmers suffer even more from this. Because we're used to editing text files to get things done, the notion of editing a config file or writing a script to get something to do what you want doesn't seem that unreasonable to software developers. Maybe it should.
Now tell us what graphical interface developers spend their time thinking about.
Are they real world problems like the examples given above.
What is more important.
Someone once said the best interface is no interface.
If I do not have to think about an "interface", if the program is doing its job without requiring interaction, then that is more time I have to focus on what is important.
Not all software can be like this but a lot can. As the article indicates, there is an enormous amount of "forced interaction" in today's computers. This is in part because companies that employ interface developers rely on the online advertising business to make money.
That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar
I think about it every time I'm forced to use it. I think about how much I hate it, how constantly clicking between tabs slows me down, and how much more productive I was without it.
For mainly this reason, I still use Word 2003 and have no plans to switch until the fad passes and someone in UI at Microsoft finally stops designing for the lowest common denominator and remembers the point of toolbars wasn't to replace menus, but rather to put commonly used functions one click away.
I'm a dev and I cannot cringe at a user failure to operate a piece of software.
Even those with a solid enough mind and education will have issues, french teacher told me she couldn't bear the improper use of verbs and nouns in her daily usage. It's a gigantic mess.
> realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted.
Though from a practical PoV those two states are often hard to distinguish. Very similar hand-holding is required in each case.
> Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI.
This is very true. We provide accountability/competence/compliance management software for regulated industries (mainly savings and investment banking ATM) and for most of our users touching our software is a secondary task linked to their main roles. Even the day-to-day admins and UAT testers for new releases, are seconded from other areas or worse effectively being asked to use our software on top of their usual roles (an extra task given with no extra time assigned or other tasks paused).
A good UI is the one that the user doesn't notice. That means it has to be intuitive and consistent, and shouldn't ever distract the user.
Distractions include sudden popups that aren't the result of an immediately preceding interaction (looking at you, iOS). And those login forms. No one ever wants to see a login form for something they've already logged into from this browser/device.
Also, it might seem silly to point out, but use your goddamn product yourself the way your users would. That alone really helps with many UI/UX issues.
Years ago I was switching my father from DOS to Windows. He was resisting learning about the computer. Not because he was stupid, he has a PhD from Harvard. He was busy trying to consolidate his understanding of 1000 years of English literature and move the field forward. He needed the computer to write with, and was willing to learn how to do that. Everything else was a distraction.
The article talks about respecting users but at the same time describes using Facebook as "mindlessly scrolling through feeds of what can most easily be described as garbage content". There is a big disconnect here. If people are actually smart and able to make their own decisions, maybe there is something more to Facebook than "mindless scrolling"?
I'm taking the "minimum cognition principle" ... the least time required to make a decision the better. It's like riding a bike - if you had to think about it you might get in an accident.
I get what the author is trying to say, and to a large extent I agree with it. But...
I have to admit the first thing that came into my head after reading the title was “well actually, some of them are, dude”. There’s a reason why no-one really wants to work the hell-desk and act as the front line for user support. There’s a reason why websites like ‘Not always right’ exist. There’s a reason why Reddit has /r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk...
I think it’s as much a disservice to assume that all users are enlightened angelic creatures, who only need that little pointer to go their own happy way, as it is to assume they’re all lazy and stupid. Sure, start off with the helpful approach, but shutting down people who are only there to scam a deal or make themselves a nuisance would go a long way to curbing that behaviour.
Stupid, on the other hand, is something that needs to be coped with well - and good design can certainly help. Stupid needs the hand-holding, because there’s nothing the client can do to help it. “Stupid” is also often just unfamiliarity, so good hand-holding will prevent a repeat of the situation.
Lazy/entitled I have no truck with. If you’re not willing to help yourself, I’m sure as hell not going to do it for you. I’d never make it past the first day in customer support...
If the primary goals of your product's design are engagement and ad revenue, of course you're going to chafe at the fact that users don't want to sit comatose in front of screens all day making you money in whichever way you've found is the most efficient. And, of course, when you notice this sort of ~~disengagement~~ behavior, you're going to try and figure out how to trick the user into doing what you want.
These days it seems just as likely that some other EvilCorp™ with more money than you has done a better job hijacking your potential users' attentions as that your users really do have something better to do. But either way, I think the "focus on the user" kind of mantras painted on the walls of so many tech offices have been twisted into something horribly exploitative or beaten into irrelevance by rote repetition without thought. So many "products" being "sold" to users these days aren't really products at all, in the sense that if they do offer the user something of real value it's almost by accident. There is no value, absolutely none, placed on building a quality product for its own sake.
If you're all tangled up in this mess and "users are stupid and lazy" is what lets you sleep at night, I don't blame you.
As someone with ADHD, I really struggle with this.
I spend a lot of time turning off features that were built to distract me. Notification badges, unread item counts, related content, news feeds put in places where they don't belong etc.
Some simple tasks are made deliberately difficult by this. For example, why is it so hard to get just the weather, without any bullshit?
We could just go all the way in and say "users are not sentient [therefore we can exploit them to our heart's content]".
Related is my issue with most "data-driven" companies these days. Extensive telemetry and A/B testing isn't "being user centered", it's just the feedback leg of the control system over your users that you're designing to mine them for all they're worth.
A favorite quote of mine from The Humane Interface:
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
There is a temptation as a designer/programmer to present the world with MY PERFECT VISION of what a piece of software should be like. Nothing wrong with that, as far as experimenting with and presenting new ideas. But a mindset that produces better software is one of serving the needs of the users. Of course there is an entire profession in identifying the "needs" and studying the "users". But the mindset: "we build tools that enables users", is the first step.
Far more insidious and destructive to the general computer experience has been the rise of businesses, whose entire purpose is to produce software that exploits it's users. I don't know the solution to this phenomenon but I find it repulsive and strive to avoid this software as much as I'm able. Raskin's dedication for the above book:
We are oppressed by our electronic servants. This book is dedicated to our liberation.
Might have been tongue in cheek then but feels disturbingly serious now.
I’m going to be honest. I have many times said, “users are stupid, if we don’t make this obvious they won’t get it”.
Now. Am I really saying that they users are stupid? Of course no. Saying that a user is stupid is just an assertion to say that you really have to design as if users were highly incapable of inferring complex mechanics or interactions, because the reality is that there’s always a subset of users that legitimately won’t get it.
I get what the author is saying though. Referring to a user as stupid is derogatory, but when I have personally used that phrasing I always include myself as part of that group of users. I don’t know anyone that uses it differently.
It’s us collectively as software users that we are stupid. It’s not a direct insult to an specific user or cohort of users. It’s just a token to assert that your software should be “stupidly” easy to use.
If someone has used this phrasing beyond it’s rhetorical meaning, then they don’t have the empathy to design software. Simple.
I just believe that nobody uses this phrasing to personally insult another person, and that we shouldn’t be focusing in such small trivialities. Designing software has more complex ethical implications than trying to poke holes at your communication style.
Again. Most people that use this phrasing do it to assert a point. I don’t think I have ever seen this phrasing used in anything formal. This is just a desk phrase to say that a particular thing is too complex. Seems really unnecessary to even argue around this, honestly.
Regarding the example of people mindlessly scrolling. This is also in part a result of the measured objectives/metrics by the company. When a company like Facebook over optimizes for likes and shares, as opposed to say depth of interpersonal connections or something else, then the product evolves to treat users as if they’ve no personality beyond engagement on the feed. That happens even if there is no explicit judgement passed on the users. Source: I used to work on the algorithmic newsfeed of a social media, not Fb.
I designed software for quantum computing researchers. They were clearly not stupid people, and the design was completely tailored to their needs, but in early iterations of the design, they still struggled with a lot of the same things users of an ordinary website would have struggled with: trouble orienting, trouble finding the primary actions in a screen, etc. It wasn't a catastrophe, we just observed them and fixed the problems.
But, I realized that I'd taken for granted that they were "experts users", not dummies, and that they would easily figure this stuff out. Heck, they might even appreciate not having their hands held! Unsafe assumption.
From this experience, I took away the lesson that users may not be stupid , but you won't go wrong pretending they are, and taking the same precautions you would if they were.
I noticed an interesting dichotomy watching people use software I worked on:
- When engineers design software, we design it with the mindset that people like using software and will appreciate all the cool features.
- When non-engineers use software, they do it because they need to use it, not because they like it. They have other stuff to do. If anything it's an obstacle to what they need to do, so they interact with it as little as possible to do what they need.
So, imo that line about respect for your users was spot-on. Don't get in your user's way more than you have to.
I really resonated with this post, I share a lot of its perspectives. And if the author is reading, self-determinism is exceptionally useful when raising children[1].
And if there is anything that my life has taught me, it is that potentially everyone responds differently to the same stimulus. There are few "universal" things about people and so generalizations are difficult if not impossible with regard to how people will react.
Understanding that can help avert the 'dual user stories' quagmire that some products find themselves in. Imagine your text editor product development team is half hard-core vim users and half hard-core emacs users. Maybe you put together this team because you wanted a product that appealed to all text editor users, maybe it was just thrown together, however such a team was formed, my experience is that it will produce a substandard product that will not appeal to anyone. This seems to happen because the conflicting visions of "a good editor" within the team seep into the product and the users of the result are often confused as different parts of the same product seem to have different philosophies about how the product should work.
That said, I'd love a product like 'Monarch Money' that was a) not subscription based and b) not cloud hosted :-).
[1] Anecdotally of course, just a survey of my general social group of which roughly 40% chose to have children and pretty much half took a "self determination" route in child raising and the other half took a "guided/trained" route.
The purpose of UX in my mind is to be able to constantly create beginners that can become engaged and advanced users.
Knowing your audience, and how to create beginners is critical. Helping them get up to speed as quickly as possible is the goal, not assuming they are stupid or lazy.
This article was plausible for me, up until it might not account for users who do not have digital literacy or capabilities like the writer's own. There might be a bit of a blind spot there, ironically.
Many of our major services started the same way.. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all started as very simple services for people to learn new digital experiences and interactions.
With these social media digital interactions as a foundation, maybe it's possible to place more complex initial interactions in front of some users.. but I feel that the digital alienation of people is real and one of the things that may be fueling the divide in society when it comes to access to opportunity.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra in 1982 on "users" [1] (please read the rest of the EWD as it is too much to paste here):
"The computer “user” isn’t a real person of flesh and blood, with passions and brains. No, he is a mythical figure, and not a very pleasant one either. A kind of mongrel with money but without taste, an ugly caricature that is very uninspiring to work for. He is, as a matter of fact, such an uninspiring idiot that his stupidity alone is a sufficient explanation for the ugliness of most computer systems. And oh! Is he uneducated! That is perhaps his most depressing characteristic. He is equally education-resistant as another equally mythical bore, “the average programmer”, whose solid stupidity is the greatest barrier to progress in programming. "
As a product designer, I don't really see many fellow designers who would think that "users are stupid".
What I do se a LOT though is designers disrespecting users' time. Many see their product as the center of the world, expecting and kinda forcing the user to spend much more time and energy with their product that is really needed.
At some level, I wonder how possible it is for your bespoke software product to be as usable as a door. A door is simpler than most software, and we've built the same exact door millions of times. We may be spending a lot of time on design when no design will ever help anything.
I am instead going to propose what I think software should aim for.
1) Software should be safe to explore. Trying things out is how you learn. Accumulating learning is how you become productive. With that in mind, you should never allow the user run a command that creates a situation where they can't revert to the previous state. When one wrong move can erase hours of work, your users will never become experts. (Historically, software has been absolutely awful here.
I think this is the number one reason why people are afraid of software -- the one UI paradigm they've learned throughout every new "UI innovation" is "one wrong move will destroy your work". So they tread carefully, and being careful is slow and painful.)
2) A user that knows the jargon that describes some command should be able to run that command by name. Teaching users the jargon can be hard, but once they've learned the word, they should be able to at least run the command. An example is watching a YouTube tutorial for some operation that was recorded a few versions ago. Sinc the tutorial was made, someone moved every menu item around (hello, Fusion 360). Now the tutorial is useless -- you know the command you want to run and how to use that command, but you have to dig around in the UI looking for it. That's a big fail. (I called out Fusion 360 for this, but they have a command search, so it's not a big deal. The search could be better, like maybe telling you how to do it faster next time ("next time, just press X"), but at least it's there. I'll also point out that Emacs does this, and even tells you the shortcut after the command is over. If a 1970s LISP app can do it, so can your whizbang Electron app.)
Anyway, I'm not sure I'd understand how to use a door the first time I saw one. Normally you can't walk through walls, but with this innovation, you can. Weird! But once you see someone else use it, or someone walks you through it (literally), it's pretty easy. With software, we are creating new concepts like that several times a day. At some point, we have to accept that the user will have to try it out and learn how to use it. There is a first time for everything, after all.
> "And I’ve found that good products, ones that respect their users, give them more control. Bad products take away control."
Thank you for this.
Also, even better products have ways to signal how they are providing control. Sadly, UIs have reduced the means of doing so in a standardised, immediately accessibly way over the years.
I've often seen this attitude doesn't apply to just "users". Indeed there are many people that come from college backgrounds that generally treat "the public" as stupid. To get into the good graces of such people you have to agree with them.
When wading through the actual issues "the public" has, individually, you'll find that the issues are actually real. Usually some un-turned nugget of wisdom that was not applied in a very specific way. Many people learn things in a variety of ways. Different learning methods don't make people stupid either.
This strikes me as semantics. I've never heard that anybody says "users are stupid" in a truly derogatory way. It's a shortcut for a long-winded explanation that you'll deal with a lot of different people, some of whom will barely understand what's happening.
An example I like is Amazon's question feature. If you buy a product and somebody else has a question about it, Amazon will mail you and ask whether you can answer the question. When you browse Amazon, you'll notice that quite a few people don't understand what's happening at all. They believe that some person has directed a question at them personally, and feel compelled to answer, even if they have no idea. Amazon being Amazon lets those answers go live, and so you'll see answers like "Dear Mr. Doe, unfortunately this was a gift for my nephew, so I cannot tell you how large the item is compared to a banana". Others are using it for support, I've seen things like "Hi Amazon, I don't know. Can you please tell me how to find more from manufacturer X?"
"Users are stupid" is short and catchy, and it beats holding an hour long explanation session each time you want to remind somebody that they're not designing something to be used by people like them, but by society at large. And many users are, in regard to this technology, stupid.
Is anyone actually judging them, saying they're horrible people or something similar?
Android 10 is so full of usability bugs. It always makes me think! I still cannot use my phone in a semi-automatic pattern after months. There are always notifications that cannot be dismissed, smartlock working randomly, etc.
Take AndroidAuto: the order of the icons always changes on the front screen. That is so stupid I have no words for it!!!
Google Drive: you have to scroll up to the top so that new items appear at the bottom of the list.
Agreed. I seem to see this sort of narrative of users being stupid as less and less prevalent (as opposed to 5-10 years ago) but it seems to still remains in some people's minds, although I'd like to think not in the majority. If discussions like this one can make those people's opinions change even just a bit then it's a net benefit.
The cure to this sort of thinking is two spoonfuls of empathy: one for others (truly putting ourselves into other people's shoes or lack thereof), and another one for ourselves (understanding our own issues better).
You might think that a GUI is a waste of your time because you can use CLIs, yet non-intuitive flags or help messages lead you to google time and time again the same awk or sed command (or whatever else). You're always someone else's stupid.
Meet people where they're at, not where you're at. That is by the way true for users as much as it is for your manager, your sales team, and so on.
I have no good idea about the origin of users as lazy. However, there is a good argument for an origin of users as stupid. And this might be the close connection of Human Computer Interaction with Cognitive Science, which understands thinking as computational. Thus, the ideal way of thinking is computer-like and diversions from this are framed as due to limitations that cause problems and need to be worked around: The user is like a limited and erratically failing computer.
The user and the designer have very different motives. It is no wonder that there is a significant misunderstanding.
The user just wants to do what they want to do. Usually the motive is very straight-forward, and almost fleeting. A small subset of their life is affected by this product, and they can easily choose away from it. The relationship is thin.
The designer not only designs for themselves, but for other people. This includes understanding the world, but also has to do with social value. What you create, in many contexts, dictates how you are viewed. The designer cannot choose away from their own product. Their relationship is very thick, complex, and personal.
When the users do not understand your own brainchild, it is hard to lose your own ego. It is easier to keep your own ego and criticize those that threaten it.
[+] [-] sime2009|5 years ago|reply
Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it.
That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar. They are thinking about how to address that new prospective customer.
That person in Excel isn't thinking about cells either. They are thinking about whether Robin in R&D is going to get the figures for Q2 to them in time.
Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI.
[+] [-] dkarl|5 years ago|reply
Voice from the next room: "Can you help me, dkarl? The computer won't save my document."
Me, comfy in my chair: "What does it say?"
"It's doing something weird."
"Weird how? What does it say?"
"I don't know, I was just saving like I always do, and now there's this window and it wants me to do something."
"What is it asking you to do?"
"It wants me to click something? I don't know, maybe it wants a password or it's not going to do it because of iCloud or something? It's been weird lately."
"Okay. What are the words in the window where it wants you to click something?"
"It says... oh, it says there's another file with this name already."
"Okay, do you want me to come over there and help you find the other file and see what's in it?"
"No, I can do it. Thank you!"
I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face.
[+] [-] jwr|5 years ago|reply
I'd put it differently. Realize that your app is not the center of the world. Your users have things to do, and using your app is a small fraction of their life. Even though it might be your baby and you might be spending all of your waking ours thinking about your app, user perspective is different.
[+] [-] notatoad|5 years ago|reply
but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person.
You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
The seminal work on interaction design isn't Don't Make Me Think, it's About Face. About Face makes thee general rule that you should not design for beginners or experts but for the perpetual intermediate.
[+] [-] nlawalker|5 years ago|reply
A developer might spend a huge amount of time and effort modeling a workflow or a process into something crisp enough for a machine to process. That might take months of what feels like pulling teeth from people to extract requirements - people who are supposed to be domain experts. By the time he's done, he probably understands everything better than the people whose job it is to use the tool - the tool that now enables them to ignore and forget about parts of their job and complete it with 10% of their attention.
"Stupid users - they barely understand their own job and I spent months learning the finest details about it to build them a tool so they can keep doing it without understanding it at all."
Not saying it's right, but I can see how it happens.
[+] [-] momokoko|5 years ago|reply
Right, we also need to remember that simple is not better than possible.
If your interface is too simple and feature limited that your user can not complete their task, then you have gone too far.
We want to reduce friction as much as possible while still allowing a customer to solve their problem.
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply
Yep. It's probably over used as an example, but I always come back to pinch-zoom. People don't care about your UI, the best you can let them do is directly manipulate their data. Anything else is a compromise. That compromise is always going to be there, but we need to minimize it.
MS Office has turned into a sort of industrial machine with a control panel. You can do anything to your data if you know what sequence of buttons to push to tell the machine what to do. Actually that peaked several years ago and they have been getting better about more direct access to features. OTOH they also have so much functionality that such UI will never go away completely.
On a related tangent, I feel like tools for programmers suffer even more from this. Because we're used to editing text files to get things done, the notion of editing a config file or writing a script to get something to do what you want doesn't seem that unreasonable to software developers. Maybe it should.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
Are they real world problems like the examples given above.
What is more important.
Someone once said the best interface is no interface.
If I do not have to think about an "interface", if the program is doing its job without requiring interaction, then that is more time I have to focus on what is important.
Not all software can be like this but a lot can. As the article indicates, there is an enormous amount of "forced interaction" in today's computers. This is in part because companies that employ interface developers rely on the online advertising business to make money.
[+] [-] rkagerer|5 years ago|reply
I think about it every time I'm forced to use it. I think about how much I hate it, how constantly clicking between tabs slows me down, and how much more productive I was without it.
For mainly this reason, I still use Word 2003 and have no plans to switch until the fad passes and someone in UI at Microsoft finally stops designing for the lowest common denominator and remembers the point of toolbars wasn't to replace menus, but rather to put commonly used functions one click away.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
a recipe for rote disaster
I'm a dev and I cannot cringe at a user failure to operate a piece of software.
Even those with a solid enough mind and education will have issues, french teacher told me she couldn't bear the improper use of verbs and nouns in her daily usage. It's a gigantic mess.
[+] [-] dspillett|5 years ago|reply
Though from a practical PoV those two states are often hard to distinguish. Very similar hand-holding is required in each case.
> Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI.
This is very true. We provide accountability/competence/compliance management software for regulated industries (mainly savings and investment banking ATM) and for most of our users touching our software is a secondary task linked to their main roles. Even the day-to-day admins and UAT testers for new releases, are seconded from other areas or worse effectively being asked to use our software on top of their usual roles (an extra task given with no extra time assigned or other tasks paused).
[+] [-] grishka|5 years ago|reply
Distractions include sudden popups that aren't the result of an immediately preceding interaction (looking at you, iOS). And those login forms. No one ever wants to see a login form for something they've already logged into from this browser/device.
Also, it might seem silly to point out, but use your goddamn product yourself the way your users would. That alone really helps with many UI/UX issues.
[+] [-] jake_morrison|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goto11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outericky|5 years ago|reply
Therefore, it shouldn't distract from the task at hand.
[+] [-] luxurycommunism|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] spacedcowboy|5 years ago|reply
I have to admit the first thing that came into my head after reading the title was “well actually, some of them are, dude”. There’s a reason why no-one really wants to work the hell-desk and act as the front line for user support. There’s a reason why websites like ‘Not always right’ exist. There’s a reason why Reddit has /r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk...
I think it’s as much a disservice to assume that all users are enlightened angelic creatures, who only need that little pointer to go their own happy way, as it is to assume they’re all lazy and stupid. Sure, start off with the helpful approach, but shutting down people who are only there to scam a deal or make themselves a nuisance would go a long way to curbing that behaviour.
Stupid, on the other hand, is something that needs to be coped with well - and good design can certainly help. Stupid needs the hand-holding, because there’s nothing the client can do to help it. “Stupid” is also often just unfamiliarity, so good hand-holding will prevent a repeat of the situation.
Lazy/entitled I have no truck with. If you’re not willing to help yourself, I’m sure as hell not going to do it for you. I’d never make it past the first day in customer support...
[+] [-] caconym_|5 years ago|reply
These days it seems just as likely that some other EvilCorp™ with more money than you has done a better job hijacking your potential users' attentions as that your users really do have something better to do. But either way, I think the "focus on the user" kind of mantras painted on the walls of so many tech offices have been twisted into something horribly exploitative or beaten into irrelevance by rote repetition without thought. So many "products" being "sold" to users these days aren't really products at all, in the sense that if they do offer the user something of real value it's almost by accident. There is no value, absolutely none, placed on building a quality product for its own sake.
If you're all tangled up in this mess and "users are stupid and lazy" is what lets you sleep at night, I don't blame you.
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
I spend a lot of time turning off features that were built to distract me. Notification badges, unread item counts, related content, news feeds put in places where they don't belong etc.
Some simple tasks are made deliberately difficult by this. For example, why is it so hard to get just the weather, without any bullshit?
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|5 years ago|reply
Related is my issue with most "data-driven" companies these days. Extensive telemetry and A/B testing isn't "being user centered", it's just the feedback leg of the control system over your users that you're designing to mine them for all they're worth.
[+] [-] intrepidhero|5 years ago|reply
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
There is a temptation as a designer/programmer to present the world with MY PERFECT VISION of what a piece of software should be like. Nothing wrong with that, as far as experimenting with and presenting new ideas. But a mindset that produces better software is one of serving the needs of the users. Of course there is an entire profession in identifying the "needs" and studying the "users". But the mindset: "we build tools that enables users", is the first step.
Far more insidious and destructive to the general computer experience has been the rise of businesses, whose entire purpose is to produce software that exploits it's users. I don't know the solution to this phenomenon but I find it repulsive and strive to avoid this software as much as I'm able. Raskin's dedication for the above book:
We are oppressed by our electronic servants. This book is dedicated to our liberation.
Might have been tongue in cheek then but feels disturbingly serious now.
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
Now. Am I really saying that they users are stupid? Of course no. Saying that a user is stupid is just an assertion to say that you really have to design as if users were highly incapable of inferring complex mechanics or interactions, because the reality is that there’s always a subset of users that legitimately won’t get it.
I get what the author is saying though. Referring to a user as stupid is derogatory, but when I have personally used that phrasing I always include myself as part of that group of users. I don’t know anyone that uses it differently.
It’s us collectively as software users that we are stupid. It’s not a direct insult to an specific user or cohort of users. It’s just a token to assert that your software should be “stupidly” easy to use.
If someone has used this phrasing beyond it’s rhetorical meaning, then they don’t have the empathy to design software. Simple.
I just believe that nobody uses this phrasing to personally insult another person, and that we shouldn’t be focusing in such small trivialities. Designing software has more complex ethical implications than trying to poke holes at your communication style.
Again. Most people that use this phrasing do it to assert a point. I don’t think I have ever seen this phrasing used in anything formal. This is just a desk phrase to say that a particular thing is too complex. Seems really unnecessary to even argue around this, honestly.
[+] [-] mitko|5 years ago|reply
If you optimize for sheep, you get sheep
[+] [-] karaterobot|5 years ago|reply
But, I realized that I'd taken for granted that they were "experts users", not dummies, and that they would easily figure this stuff out. Heck, they might even appreciate not having their hands held! Unsafe assumption.
From this experience, I took away the lesson that users may not be stupid , but you won't go wrong pretending they are, and taking the same precautions you would if they were.
[+] [-] allo37|5 years ago|reply
- When engineers design software, we design it with the mindset that people like using software and will appreciate all the cool features.
- When non-engineers use software, they do it because they need to use it, not because they like it. They have other stuff to do. If anything it's an obstacle to what they need to do, so they interact with it as little as possible to do what they need.
So, imo that line about respect for your users was spot-on. Don't get in your user's way more than you have to.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
And if there is anything that my life has taught me, it is that potentially everyone responds differently to the same stimulus. There are few "universal" things about people and so generalizations are difficult if not impossible with regard to how people will react.
Understanding that can help avert the 'dual user stories' quagmire that some products find themselves in. Imagine your text editor product development team is half hard-core vim users and half hard-core emacs users. Maybe you put together this team because you wanted a product that appealed to all text editor users, maybe it was just thrown together, however such a team was formed, my experience is that it will produce a substandard product that will not appeal to anyone. This seems to happen because the conflicting visions of "a good editor" within the team seep into the product and the users of the result are often confused as different parts of the same product seem to have different philosophies about how the product should work.
That said, I'd love a product like 'Monarch Money' that was a) not subscription based and b) not cloud hosted :-).
[1] Anecdotally of course, just a survey of my general social group of which roughly 40% chose to have children and pretty much half took a "self determination" route in child raising and the other half took a "guided/trained" route.
[+] [-] j45|5 years ago|reply
Knowing your audience, and how to create beginners is critical. Helping them get up to speed as quickly as possible is the goal, not assuming they are stupid or lazy.
This article was plausible for me, up until it might not account for users who do not have digital literacy or capabilities like the writer's own. There might be a bit of a blind spot there, ironically.
Many of our major services started the same way.. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all started as very simple services for people to learn new digital experiences and interactions.
With these social media digital interactions as a foundation, maybe it's possible to place more complex initial interactions in front of some users.. but I feel that the digital alienation of people is real and one of the things that may be fueling the divide in society when it comes to access to opportunity.
This post by Google's CEO articulates the alienation that not helping create beginners can fuel: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/digital-technology-mus...
[+] [-] edejong|5 years ago|reply
"The computer “user” isn’t a real person of flesh and blood, with passions and brains. No, he is a mythical figure, and not a very pleasant one either. A kind of mongrel with money but without taste, an ugly caricature that is very uninspiring to work for. He is, as a matter of fact, such an uninspiring idiot that his stupidity alone is a sufficient explanation for the ugliness of most computer systems. And oh! Is he uneducated! That is perhaps his most depressing characteristic. He is equally education-resistant as another equally mythical bore, “the average programmer”, whose solid stupidity is the greatest barrier to progress in programming. "
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
[+] [-] josefrichter|5 years ago|reply
What I do se a LOT though is designers disrespecting users' time. Many see their product as the center of the world, expecting and kinda forcing the user to spend much more time and energy with their product that is really needed.
[+] [-] jrockway|5 years ago|reply
I am instead going to propose what I think software should aim for.
1) Software should be safe to explore. Trying things out is how you learn. Accumulating learning is how you become productive. With that in mind, you should never allow the user run a command that creates a situation where they can't revert to the previous state. When one wrong move can erase hours of work, your users will never become experts. (Historically, software has been absolutely awful here. I think this is the number one reason why people are afraid of software -- the one UI paradigm they've learned throughout every new "UI innovation" is "one wrong move will destroy your work". So they tread carefully, and being careful is slow and painful.)
2) A user that knows the jargon that describes some command should be able to run that command by name. Teaching users the jargon can be hard, but once they've learned the word, they should be able to at least run the command. An example is watching a YouTube tutorial for some operation that was recorded a few versions ago. Sinc the tutorial was made, someone moved every menu item around (hello, Fusion 360). Now the tutorial is useless -- you know the command you want to run and how to use that command, but you have to dig around in the UI looking for it. That's a big fail. (I called out Fusion 360 for this, but they have a command search, so it's not a big deal. The search could be better, like maybe telling you how to do it faster next time ("next time, just press X"), but at least it's there. I'll also point out that Emacs does this, and even tells you the shortcut after the command is over. If a 1970s LISP app can do it, so can your whizbang Electron app.)
Anyway, I'm not sure I'd understand how to use a door the first time I saw one. Normally you can't walk through walls, but with this innovation, you can. Weird! But once you see someone else use it, or someone walks you through it (literally), it's pretty easy. With software, we are creating new concepts like that several times a day. At some point, we have to accept that the user will have to try it out and learn how to use it. There is a first time for everything, after all.
[+] [-] masswerk|5 years ago|reply
Thank you for this.
Also, even better products have ways to signal how they are providing control. Sadly, UIs have reduced the means of doing so in a standardised, immediately accessibly way over the years.
[+] [-] rhacker|5 years ago|reply
When wading through the actual issues "the public" has, individually, you'll find that the issues are actually real. Usually some un-turned nugget of wisdom that was not applied in a very specific way. Many people learn things in a variety of ways. Different learning methods don't make people stupid either.
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
An example I like is Amazon's question feature. If you buy a product and somebody else has a question about it, Amazon will mail you and ask whether you can answer the question. When you browse Amazon, you'll notice that quite a few people don't understand what's happening at all. They believe that some person has directed a question at them personally, and feel compelled to answer, even if they have no idea. Amazon being Amazon lets those answers go live, and so you'll see answers like "Dear Mr. Doe, unfortunately this was a gift for my nephew, so I cannot tell you how large the item is compared to a banana". Others are using it for support, I've seen things like "Hi Amazon, I don't know. Can you please tell me how to find more from manufacturer X?"
"Users are stupid" is short and catchy, and it beats holding an hour long explanation session each time you want to remind somebody that they're not designing something to be used by people like them, but by society at large. And many users are, in regard to this technology, stupid.
Is anyone actually judging them, saying they're horrible people or something similar?
[+] [-] jerome-jh|5 years ago|reply
Take AndroidAuto: the order of the icons always changes on the front screen. That is so stupid I have no words for it!!!
Google Drive: you have to scroll up to the top so that new items appear at the bottom of the list.
And so on ...
[+] [-] cmehdy|5 years ago|reply
The cure to this sort of thinking is two spoonfuls of empathy: one for others (truly putting ourselves into other people's shoes or lack thereof), and another one for ourselves (understanding our own issues better).
You might think that a GUI is a waste of your time because you can use CLIs, yet non-intuitive flags or help messages lead you to google time and time again the same awk or sed command (or whatever else). You're always someone else's stupid.
Meet people where they're at, not where you're at. That is by the way true for users as much as it is for your manager, your sales team, and so on.
[+] [-] simulo|5 years ago|reply
Gedenryd showed the problems of understanding the user and designer as thinking computationally in his PhD thesis: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-designers-work-mak...
[+] [-] avindroth|5 years ago|reply
The user just wants to do what they want to do. Usually the motive is very straight-forward, and almost fleeting. A small subset of their life is affected by this product, and they can easily choose away from it. The relationship is thin.
The designer not only designs for themselves, but for other people. This includes understanding the world, but also has to do with social value. What you create, in many contexts, dictates how you are viewed. The designer cannot choose away from their own product. Their relationship is very thick, complex, and personal.
When the users do not understand your own brainchild, it is hard to lose your own ego. It is easier to keep your own ego and criticize those that threaten it.