No, We're Not the stupid ones

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?<p>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."<p>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 &#62; 90% of support requests of that nature and increase your sales at the margin.

People who submit stories: please submit the URL of the <i>article</i>, not the anchor-laden URL of the <i>comments</i>.<p>This happens all the time, and it's annoying.<p>Thank you.

It's strange that people treat this as a moral question: "It's <i>okay</i> to expect them to learn how to use the internet". As if you have some sort of obligation to serve everyone.<p>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 <i>should</i> learn the internet" or "developers <i>should</i> make their software easier to use" are worthless.

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.

"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."<p>Amen.

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:<p>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.).<p>I have to retrain myself to open a browser, get another cup of tea, THEN hot-key to the address bar and start typing.<p>Okay, well, yes, a cup of tea is an exaggeration, but I think you get my drift.

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.<p>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.<p>So I wouldn't blame web site UIs so much as Browser UIs.<p>Curious: those Facebook Connect people were using IE, or FF? Wouldn't IE use Bing search?

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.

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.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126659" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126659</a>

Missing the point entirely.<p>Yes, Google worked as it was intended to work.<p>No, how Google is intended to work is not the ideal solution for the problem people are trying to solve when they use Google.<p>It's the wrong solution. That's the point.

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