21–30 of 280 posts
First: virtually nobody using information technology has any idea of what it's really doing, or how to do anything beyond a very narrow bound of tasks. This includes the apparently proficient, and it's almost always amusing to discover the bounds and limits in knowledge and use of computers by the highly capable. Children, often described as "digital natives", are better described as "digitally fearless": they're unaware of any possible consequences, and tend to plunge in where adults are more reticent. Actual capability is generally very superficial (with notable exceptions, of course).
Second: if you're building for mass market, you've got to keep things exceedingly and painfully simple. Though this can be frustrating (keep reading), there's absolutely a place for this, and for systems that are used by millions to billions (think: lifts, fuel pumps, information kiosks), keeping controls, options, and presentation to the absolute minimum and clearest possible matters.
Third: Looking into the psychological foundations of intellectual capabilities and capacity is a fascinating (and frequently fraught) domain. Direct experience with blood relatives suggests any possible genetic contribution is dwarfed by experiential and environmental factors. Jean Piaget's work, and subsequent, makes for hugely instructive reading.
Fourth: If you are building for general use keep your UI and conceptual architecture as stable as possible. There simply is NOT a big win at UI innovation, a lesson Mozilla's jwz noted years ago. (Safe archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...) Apple's Mac has seen two variants of its UI in over 35 years, and the current OSX / MacOS variant is now older than the classic Mac UI was when OSX was introduced. Food for thought and humble pie for GUI tweakers.
Fifth: if you're building for domain experts, or are an expert user forced to contend with consumer-grade / general-market tools, you're going to get hit by this. The expert market is tiny. It's also subject to its own realms of bullshit (look into the audiophile market, as an example). This is much of the impetus behind my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", based in part on the OECD study and citing the Nieman-Neilsen group's article:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
(I've been engaged in a decades-long love-hate, and increasingly the latter, battle with information technology.)
Absent some certification or requirements floor (think commercial and general aviation as examples), technical products are displaced, and general-market wants will swamp technical users' needs and interests.
People use, Slack, Facebook messenger, iMessage, AirDrop etc. Even kids often use DropBox to turn in work or whatever Google Docs uses.
For day to day use, my wife, son and I have a shared calendar that we update on our phone. If someone texts me a date, I just click on it to add it to a calendar.
Even when people do respond or send an email to people in their personal life, it’s usually to one person not a group. For groups, they will usually use a messaging app.
Even with corporate training the users I worked with couldn't find out how to do things even with a FAQ, HOWTO, F1 Help, and Help Desk helping them out. Web and Desktop apps. Plus they requested features that already were in the programs to be added in the next release. Which means they didn't know how to access them.
I've spent upwards of a quarter hour in support calls or installfests trying to get someone to open a terminal window and issue 2-3 commands.
I routinely get asked for assistance with such technical tasks as: deleting spam email, restoring sidebars and menus, resetting font sizes, locating a window that's been hidden behind another foreground window. This from otherwise nominally self-sufficient, educated, professional adults.
Though in cases there are sensory and motor impairments involved.
The users themselves consider themselves proficient. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
I think a better conclusion is "if these skills are important, design software which aids in and rewards the development of them."
If your software is designed with some UX which is hyper-optimized to get users to do some small handful of tasks you thought of, instead of designed as a simple tool they can understand, then it shouldn't be surprising if users don't learn to do anything except those tasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half of all people are below average...
no.. half of people are below the median.. I know it's a bit pedantic but in a thread making fun of stupid people lol
There are three generally used measures of central tendency:
- The mean: the "arithmetic average", sum of observations divided by count.
- The median: the central measure. The single value (or averaged pair) at the center point of an ordered listing.
- The mode: the most frequently occurring measure. Sort a set of values by frequency, and pick the most frequent instance.
Most people intend "mean" as "average", but that's not strictly the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
For our next pedant's corner post, we'll take on the distinction between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions.
It frustrates me that the takeaway of this post, and the implicit conclusion of many software designers, is "keep it extremely simple, or two thirds of the population can’t use your design." I think a better conclusion is "if these skills are important, design software which aids in and rewards the development of them." If your software is designed with some UX which is hyper-optimized to get users to do some small h…
I've personally observed (and had to help) many times where an otherwise extremely intelligent person seems to completely lose his/her brain upon being seated in front of a computer, and wonder why that is; these people can be experts in various other fields involving significant mental ability (e.g. maths, physics, chemistry), but when given the simplest of tasks to perform on the computer, like those in the article, all common sense and rational thinking seemingly disappears completely. Most people in the advanced category probably know that a computer is "a stupid machine", but could it be the "magical" nature of computing, and how it's often sold as, that completely destroys their expectations?
Relatedly, I'm pretty sure the stories at http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ are all true.
>Instead of using live websites, the participants attempted the tasks on simulated software on the test facilitator’s computer. I wonder if this really lowered all the scores, because the test UI may have been very non-standard/outdated/etc. "Simulated software" could be literally anything and could have caused a bunch of confusion among people who are used to certain icons and usage patterns.
I wonder if this really lowered all the scores, because the test UI may have been very non-standard/outdated/etc. ...or, as may as likely be the case, very "modern". I'm confident to say that I'm far in the "advanced user" category, also having been a developer for a few decades, and yet I still get perplexed often by UIs with lots of hidden functionality and confusing hieroglyphics instead of descriptive text.
Example (as a recent iPhone user): If I want to open an SMS from the lock screen notification I swipe right, if I want to clear or respond to the notification I swipe left then select from the options that appear, but if I swipe left from a little further across on the screen it opens the camera, from whence swiping right again switches to video or slow-mo instead of going back to the lock screen. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen gets a neat little toolbox thing with commonly used options, whether or not the phone is locked. Swiping down from the top brings up notifications if the phone is unlocked but doesn't seem to do anything on the lock screen (I guess because it already shows notifications?). Double-pressing the 'home' button gets you a list of open and recently-used apps, but double-tapping the same button without triggering the physical button gets you some empty tray thing at the top of the screen which I'm still not sure the function of (maybe makes it easier to swipe down and get to notifications?)
This is random and fiddly enough for someone who writes software as a day job. I can see how it would be confusing as hell to anyone who doesn't usually use computers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
no.. half of people are below the median.. I know it's a bit pedantic but in a thread making fun of stupid people lol
Median is an average. There are three generally used measures of central tendency: - The mean: the "arithmetic average", sum of observations divided by count. - The median: the central measure. The single value (or averaged pair) at the center point of an ordered listing. - The mode: the most frequently occurring measure. Sort a set of values by frequency, and pick the most frequent instance. Most people intend "mean…