
If too many users are wrong, it's probably your fault (2011) - jcolman
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/15/ui/
======
Udik
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
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
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? ;-)

------
relaytheurgency
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."

~~~
bsder
> 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.

~~~
csours
Eclipse and dependencies handling are hard problems. It works if everything is
set up perfectly, but Eclipse is _super brittle_ , and all the plugins make
bad assumptions about Eclipse and other Eclipse plugins.

~~~
bsder
> Eclipse and dependencies handling are hard problems. It works if everything
> is set up perfectly, but Eclipse is super brittle

I agree. If that is the problem, I will happily walk the student through the
setup--even at any point in the semester. If a computer craps out, _I_ will
help the student recover from the repository--I don't expect them to be able
to do that. It does also happen, rarely, that I have to actually help a
student set up their computer because they have some weird issue. I do not
consider failing at setting up your environment to be a failure of the class.
Schedule some time with me and we'll go through it together.

 _HOWEVER_ , this is generally not the problem, oddly. They get that set up
pretty much fine.

The first problem is: System.out.println("Hello, World!");

I _WARN_ people over and over. I am automated testing this. Computer output
must be _EXACT_. The comma, space, capitalization, and exclamation point _ARE
NOT OPTIONAL_. Debugging is about noticing details, and if you can't match
this, you're not going to find the actually subtle bugs later in your own
code. Really, this is the only functional line in the program--I'm not joking
about this.

The second problem is: "But I didn't know I could check this before the
assignment date." Um, I have a website set up for the class--did you check it
for the past two weeks that it has been running? I have pointed this page out
and put it on screen at both beginning and end of class for the past 4
lectures. The anonymized login ID's have a Red X for a failure and a Green +
for success. I also have the intensity modulated properly so that those who
are red/green color blind are able to tell as well.

I have just learned that I'm going to have to politely smile at all the
excuses and whining after that first assignment and tell people repeatedly
that I'm not budging on this. After the first couple of students, the rest get
the message.

~~~
csours
I wonder if your students are new enough at programming that they don't
understand what exact matching means? Even if you verbally say "exact match"
they may not have enough context to realize that means character by character
examination.

We've done programming long enough that this is ingrained to a very deep
degree, but for them, it still looks like english.

Anecdote: I had a college instructor who thought it was reasonable to write a
TCP-IP program from scratch without reference using Winsock2. I'm sure he
could do it, and I could probably do it _now_ , but as a student, not so much.

------
Negitivefrags
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
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
The link is in my profile.

~~~
munchbunny
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.

------
matt_wulfeck
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?")

------
dmm
> 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
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.

~~~
mrspeaker
First rule of game design: players don't read things. Not on the screen, and
certainly not on a cabinet - it's not the user's fault you put instructions in
text format in a place that wasn't even the screen!

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is bullshit. Somehow, the games made 20 years ago didn't know this rule
and were totally fine. We're _training_ people to be stupid. You can't
reasonably expect that a complex program will be perfectly usable for the
newbie from the get-go, and trying to assume that only makes the problem worse
for the future.

~~~
teddyh
I’d like to agree with you that games 20-30 years ago were unashamedly complex
and were the better for it, but maybe they were made for a different audience,
i.e. the small percentage of people who had invested in a home computer in the
first place.

Also: “ _In fact, users don 't read_ anything.”

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html)

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

~~~
joombaga
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
I think the GP might have been making a joke about text formatting on HN.

~~~
danieltillett
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.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
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 :-\

------
exolymph
Support work is all about empathy.

~~~
meric
Is there a profession besides robbery and looting where empathy isn't helpful?

~~~
danieltillett
Prostitution comes to mind.

~~~
meric
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
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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
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.

~~~
danieltillett
I am not too sure about this. I have met quite a few people in my life with
zero real empathy, but boy can they fake it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It might be useful to distinguish two concepts, which I think are being
conflated here:

Cognitive empathy: I can accurately predict the feelings/experiences of
another person. This can't be "faked" \- if your predictions are accurate, you
have it.

Affective empathy: I experience similar feelings to another party (perhaps
weakened) as a result of observing them experiencing it. This can be faked,
and it can also cause problems for the person who has it.

Affective empathy seems like the thing which you describe as causing problems,
while cognitive empathy seems like the thing which is useful for building
better products.

~~~
danieltillett
This is quite a good split between the rather ambitious concepts of empathy,
but I rather feel that "real" empathy is more than just cognitive empathy. If
the other person's hurt does not hurt you then it is being faked.

One thing that can always make me feel real empathy with a complete stranger
is sunburn. I am not sure why this is (I don't feel the same way about broken
bones for example despite having had them myself), but everytime I see someone
badly sunburnt I really feel it as though it was me that was burnt.

------
kazinator
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
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.

------
Animats
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?))

------
calhoun137
It's not the users fault for being stupid, it's your fault for assuming they
are not.

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

~~~
nkrisc
While I prefer to frame it with a bit more empathy, essentially, yes. This is
correct.

~~~
danieltillett
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
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
Great approach - assuming of course that your mother is not a developer :)

------
FussyZeus
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.

~~~
rodgerd
> This person is clearly not familiar with the militantly computer ignorant
> segment of the user base.

Given the anecdote she shared relates to doing desktop support for Windows
users at the dawn of web proxies, your whole premise seems like a strawman
you've erected in order to launch into a non-argument.

~~~
FussyZeus
This is not a strawman, there are dozens of people at the company where I work
(Salesman mostly, also mostly over 40) who refuse to learn anything. I'm not
talking about setting proxies or backing up config files or something, I'm
talking about refusing to use anything but Internet Explorer, refusing to keep
computers up to date, refusing to clean their own file systems and regularly
infecting their road laptops with unsightly things that we need to clean off.

(I'm not a prude but seriously I do not need to see YOUR inclinations in that
department.)

------
headShrinker
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.

