

No, We're Not the stupid ones - philcrissman
http://philcrissman.com/2010/02/16/no-were-not-the-stupid-ones

======
patio11
Ahh, users. Can't live with them, can't live without them. After we've had our
little venting, can we get back to ways to make it easier for them to pay us
money?

I have a screenshot on the front page of my website. The screenshot has
buttons on it. The buttons are, obviously, not functional. This is a difficult
concept to grasp for a sizeable portion of my user base -- you should see the
CrazyEgg heatmap and the big red dot right over the "New" button, or the
emails I got about how "I tried to use your program but none of the buttons I
clicked on worked."

There are productive and unproductive responses to that. Telling users "Look,
doofus, that's a photo. You can't interact with elements in photos. You should
know this by now." is an unproductive response: it does not help your user or
advance your business goals. Having the site actually do something when
someone clicks on the photo, to clue them in to the fact that it is in fact
not the program itself, is a productive response. It will cut > 90% of support
requests of that nature and increase your sales at the margin.

~~~
blasdel
There's a reason why people use framing devices like 3/4 views or coverflow
widgets

~~~
patio11
I think I understand what you said there up to the word "use". Can you provide
a translation for the UX-impaired?

~~~
blasdel
I feel like I've stumped the sphinx or something!

By "framing device", I mean to add context to the picture so that it's
obviously not real -- so that the monkey viewing the image perceives the
monkey on the screen as a representative icon and not another live monkey.

One option is to literally put it in a picture frame, especially scaled down
to much smaller than "life size". Make it a full screenshot with the start
bar, have the app unmaximized with some desktop around the borders with "My
Computer" peeking out, leave a mouse cursor on the image, show the mouse
hovering over some modal rollover state like a menu.

The 3/4 view is fairly extreme -- skew it isometrically so that it's not on
the normal plane. You can fall back on the shareware standby of photoshopping
it onto the front of a glossy retail box with a UPC code and system
requirements fine print on the side.

CoverFlow is kind of the nuclear option, one of the most extreme slideshow
effects you can get away with, that combines all of the previous techniques:
<http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#coverflow> \-- frame the hell out
of it on a contrasting 3D background with shadows and skewed reflections, and
skew the remaining images isometrically into a carousel of cards. Note that
Apple's screenshot of the effect is scaled to 1/9th of real size, and itself
has a reflected (though not skewed) shadow applied to it!

------
tjic
People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the _article_ , not the
anchor-laden URL of the _comments_.

This happens all the time, and it's annoying.

Thank you.

~~~
philcrissman
D'oh.

Okay, I am one of the stupid ones. Carry on.

I can edit the title but not the URL of what was submitted; which is surely by
design (and makes sense, you wouldn't want submitters altering the URL after
the fact), so I can't fix it. Noted.

~~~
thenduks
Clearly this is a major UI-fail on HN's part for not knowing you wanted just
the article and not the comments link :)

That doesn't bother me, though. What bothers me is that _your site isn't
facebook!_ _WHAT IS GOING ON!?_ __

------
ssp
It's strange that people treat this as a moral question: "It's _okay_ to
expect them to learn how to use the internet". As if you have some sort of
obligation to serve everyone.

If you do "expect them to learn how to use the internet', then you will
exclude some percentage of users, which may or may not be a good idea
depending on what you are trying to do. But moral exhortations like "users
_should_ learn the internet" or "developers _should_ make their software
easier to use" are worthless.

------
iBercovich
I am no expert, but I have been working for a few months in a user experience
team for enterprise collaboration software. In the enterprise sector we need
to assure that our applications can be used as intended by a teenager as well
as a 65 year old CEO. There are ways to make user interfaces intuitive. One is
to copy things from the material world: folders, archives, tabs, etc. The
other is to follow abstract paradigms that have been popularized by a few big
applications: microblogging, my profile, my wall, etc. In my opinion, the use
of paradigms that were created just a few years back, such as most of the
interactions in social networks, cannot be assumed to be understood by
everyone (stupid or smart) and should be made as intuitive as possible.

~~~
epochwolf
_In the enterprise sector we need to assure that our applications can be used
as intended by a teenager as well as a 65 year old CEO._

Seriously? I mean seriously?

Enterprise applications are the worse offenders for UIs I've ever seen in my
life. I've had to use a number of these programs throughout high school and 2
colleges. I've used enterprise level bug trackers and I have to say most linux
GUIs manage to be easier than these products.

The product you are working on may not be a sin against humanity but there is
a reason "enterprise" has a bad rap.

~~~
iBercovich
I completely agree. I didn't mean to say that enterprise products do a good
job at this. I was just trying to point a case where it is really important to
adapt to all user groups.

------
cesare
"It is okay to expect people to invest a little time to learn how stuff works
and to retain an adequate portion of that education."

Amen.

~~~
protomyth
From the time you get up to the time you go to bed, do you know how everything
you interact with works?

~~~
guns
Essentially, yes. Perhaps not in enough detail to replicate the world's
technologies in a time machine disaster, but certainly enough to create a
consistent mental diagram about everything around me. Cars, electricity,
furniture, plumbing, health, advertising, the economy, and most certainly,
computers.

The desire to understand the world around oneself is one of the key qualities
of a hacker, and is the central divide between this community and the world at
large.

~~~
protomyth
I think you might have a detailed mental model at the low level we are talking
for this scenario in some other areas, but I have a hard time believing you do
in some of the fields you mentioned (just to pick one where models seem to be
rather tough: economy).

I think expecting everyone who drives to be as knowledgeable as a NASCAR
driver is foolish, just as I believe expecting everyone who has learned a
behavior to adapt every time something subtle changes is too far.

usable by experts or prosumers is really not the goal.

~~~
camccann
_I think expecting everyone who drives to be as knowledgeable as a NASCAR
driver is foolish, just as I believe expecting everyone who has learned a
behavior to adapt every time something subtle changes is too far._

But I think it is fair to expect people not to use their car keys to try and
unlock someone else's car, get angry when it doesn't work, and proceed to
blame the owner of the other car and/or the parking lot.

Which, honestly, is about the level of what this article is asking for. Is
that _really_ so much?

------
raintrees
I would imagine that some of the results for people searching for fully
qualified domain names mentioned in the article may be due to something that
trips me up all of the time:

When I work on other people's computers, which are invariably slower than my
Linux boxes, I hot-key to the address bar, start typing a FQDN and hit Enter,
only to have my focus shifted for me sometime during this process to the
search engine box on the page from a slow firing page load script (thank you
msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.).

I have to retrain myself to open a browser, get another cup of tea, THEN hot-
key to the address bar and start typing.

Okay, well, yes, a cup of tea is an exaggeration, but I think you get my
drift.

~~~
derefr
Usually, when I'm working at any public/not-my-own computer, I start holding
Escape right after opening any browser windows.

------
Tichy
Doesn't the problem kind of start with browsers automatically doing a search
for the stuff that is entered into the URL field? So people never had to learn
what an URL actually is.

I think there is at least a lesson to be learned. Typing just a name into the
URL bar and "feeling lucky" seems to be EXTREMELY common. In fact, watch
anybody who is not an IT specialist surf the web, and they probably do it that
way.

So I wouldn't blame web site UIs so much as Browser UIs.

Curious: those Facebook Connect people were using IE, or FF? Wouldn't IE use
Bing search?

~~~
flogic
I would say the problem is not understanding the concept of search results.

------
daniel02216
I bet these people were typing in 'facebook login' into the Firefox URL bar,
which did an I'm Feeling Lucky search on Google. Most days, that takes you to
the actual Facebook login page, but that day it went to ReadWriteWeb. How
confusing for people who don't understand the complex rules of how the address
bar works, and who are used to seeing Facebook redesign their page without
warning every few months.

~~~
zb
No, they didn't. The first result (and the one you'd get from I'm Feeling
Lucky) was still the actual Facebook Login page. The RWW article was in the
Google News results, which appear above the search results on the Google
results page.

------
erik
I wonder if the hundreds of people wanting to log into Facebook via the Read
Write Web search result are an artifact of Google just having such huge
traffic.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126659>

~~~
philcrissman
For sure. And really... as staggering as the hundreds of comments were on RWW,
a few hundred people is not really a large percentage of the FB user base.
It's an incredibly small percentage.

~~~
epochwolf
I'd imagine at most only a third of those comments are from people actually
trying to get to facebook. The rest are trolls.

~~~
Vindexus
In briefly checking out the profiles of the accounts I'd say that at least
2/3rds of the "i cant login this sux" comments were legit. Most of the
accounts commenting like that were middle aged women with many friends and a
profile picture.

~~~
epochwolf
That really puts a dent in my opinion of humanity.

------
waterlesscloud
Missing the point entirely.

Yes, Google worked as it was intended to work.

No, how Google is intended to work is not the ideal solution for the problem
people are trying to solve when they use Google.

It's the wrong solution. That's the point.

~~~
philcrissman
Okay, if I follow you, you're saying that because people are trying to use
Google (or, let's just say, "Search") for a purpose other than it was
intended, it's the wrong solution.

That's really not too different from what I wrote; except I'm saying: people
should be _expected to recognize_ that they're using the wrong solution, and
that they need a different solution.

You seem to be suggesting that _Search_ should change something to suit the
people who are using it "wrong". (Feel free to correct me on that.) It sounds
like you're saying "Search should know what you _intend_ to look for, not just
what you _typed into the search field_".

I'm not sure I expect an algorithm to know our _intentions_. (Though Google's
'did you mean...' is clearly already trying to accomplish this, as much as
possible.)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
But they may not know of any other solution.

I actually had a similar problem just an hour ago. I needed to look up the
price of a piece of metalworking equipment. Since I had purchased items from
Wholesale Tool in the past, I entered "www.wholesaletool.com" into Firefox.
Then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out why my search for a
1-inch threading die wasn't turning up anything useful. It turns out that the
site I _really_ needed was www.wttool.com instead!

And I'm a software dev who spends a lot of time on the web! How much longer
would a non-expert have wasted before figuring this out? It's not necessarily
anyone's fault; it's just that the web can be awfully confusing at times!

~~~
brown9-2
For this to be a fair comparison you would have had to have been browsing a
news article about wholesale tools and trying to purchase a tool from this
news article.

You mistook one wholesale tool store for another, whereas these users confused
a news article about facebook's redesign for the place where you login to
facebook.

------
slapshot
Somewhat ironically, the image of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is a
Photoshop (among many other debunkings, see <http://www.hoax-
slayer.com/elephant-moon-quiz-question.shtml> ).

It's a minor point, but somebody commenting on how stupid users are to believe
anything that Google says has himself fallen for a common Google-powered meme.

~~~
philcrissman
I didn't know that... still humorous, though.

... You've also apparently misunderstood the post. I _don't_ think the users
are stupid.

I think that the statement "Google and developers are stupid and/or have
failed for allowing events like this to happen" is _incorrect_. That's the
whole point of the post.

