If too many users are wrong, it's probably your fault (2011)

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&#x27;t access their accounts. We started analyzing the problem and noticed two things:<p>1) the customers who couldn&#x27;t sign up had used illegal characters in their usernames - there was no validation in place to prevent this: bad mistake;<p>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* * * * *.<p>I didn&#x27;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 &quot;fill in the fields with asterisk&quot;. So we added the damn validation and clarified the copy.

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?<p>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&#x27;t maximizing the use of their time. I hear similar arguments about users now that I&#x27;m in IT but I&#x27;ve always felt that it is the designer&#x27;s problem if &quot;no one can use it right.&quot;

As a game developer it&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s important to remember that any time someone complains, there is a legitimate problem behind it somewhere.<p>The issue is that users don&#x27;t come to you with problems, they come to you with bad solutions. &quot;Make this monster easier&quot; &quot;Make this item drop more often&quot;, etc etc.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>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.

I&#x27;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.<p>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 (&quot;that&#x27;s a weird name...&quot; &quot;why does is this option different?&quot;)

&gt; shown that some technical types just don&#x27;t understand other people.<p>And other people are better? Writing clear instructions that random people can follow is _hard_.

[Just following instructions...](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedailywtf.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;just-following-instructions" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedailywtf.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;just-following-instructions</a>).

Support work is all about empathy.

When people click on example UI images and call support when nothing happens, <i>IT&#x27;S THEM</i>.<p>The idea that a lot of people doing the same thing can&#x27;t be wrong is wrong: yes they can be wrong.<p>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!<p>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.<p>The goal of reducing support calls was achieved, of course.

If people are mistaking screenshots for clickable windows, though, that&#x27;s easy to fix. You can give the screenshots drop shadows, and put scribbled notes on them in another color. Then they don&#x27;t look like clickable windows.<p>(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 &quot;material design&quot;, with lots of raised squares and dropped shadows. (Whatever happened to that, anyway?))

It&#x27;s not the users fault for being stupid, it&#x27;s your fault for assuming they are not.

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

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&#x2F;easier to follow, and yes there are plenty of examples of software that is out there that&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the author is one (certainly doesn&#x27;t sound like it) or that it&#x27;s even a majority, I&#x27;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&#x27;t take it personally. Some people are just rock stupid and some of that group willfully remain so.<p>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&#x27;t down for that job then you really shouldn&#x27;t have applied, and you shouldn&#x27;t be treating everyone like an idiot even when you&#x27;re pretty sure they are. That&#x27;s what you&#x27;re paid to do.

Sorry but this statement and this ideology is flawed. The user isn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t think, but they should.<p>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&#x27;s wrong?<p>However, too often products have massive flaws that designers should have predicted.