No, We're Not the stupid ones | Hacker News Reader

No, We're Not the stupid ones

philcrissman.com

62 pointsphilcrissman52 comments

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.

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

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

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!

He's saying you should alter your screenshot to make it more obvious that it's not the real thing. Frame it with an image of a monitor, give it a drop-shadow, etc.

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.

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.

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!?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

I'd say that the barrier of entry to the internet is really low, but that's the way it should be. The problem is that people don't realize that some things are tools and not toys, and learning how to use them properly is a good idea rather than just going gung-ho. Like knives, or soldering irons. Sure, you can use a knife to cut a carrot, but if you try to do it fast without the proper technique, you might lop a finger off.

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

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.

"Cars, electricity, furniture, plumbing, health, advertising, the economy, and most certainly, computers."

The list you gave is almost entirely technology and math-driven. I know plenty of people who would list "emotions, families, friends, sports, celebrities" or other non-technology-based lists and claim to be equally well-educated.

A focus on technology is not the only way "to understand the world around oneself"--there are plenty of people who understand non-technology parts of the world around us and expend just as much mental energy doing it.

I would say that "the central divide between this community and the world at large" is not a desire to understand the world, but rather a focus on intelligent use of technology. Other very intelligent and motivated people focus their understanding on other aspects of the world.

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.

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?

"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."

The discussion at hand is about whether we can expect people to have at least an acceptable level of competency. The shock that we are collectively feeling at the iPad and the RWW incident is that we have perhaps over-estimated our audience, and that we DID expect users to adapt to our interfaces, because we were already designing for usability.

I'm not sure if our expectations are too high, but I think they arise from our own experience in interacting with the world, which is likely characterized not by impatience and confusion, but by curiosity.

So no, I would not proffer economic advice a serious investor, but neither would I throw my hands up in the air in a discussion about federal money policy. And yes, I don't expect everyone to be able to disassemble their engines, or build their next dining room table (hobbies I pursued before coming to electronics and programming), but I am often disappointed when people exhibit no curiosity about the objects around them or the circumstances of their existence.

And yet, when we find another car in the lot in which we were almost positive we'd parked, we do not call the car manufacturers complaining that our car has spontaneously transformed, do we?

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That really puts a dent in my opinion of humanity.

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.

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.)

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!

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.

I am pretty much saying that Google/Search should find what I intend to look for rather than its interpretation of what I type into the search field.

Because that's clearly how the general public intends to use Google/Search.

The only reason I don't use it that way is that I've learned to adapt to its shortcomings. I'm better than most at finding what I want using Google because I've learned to speak in Googlese, so to speak. How to frame my query in a way that returns what I want. I've adapted to the tool rather than the other way around.

Clearly that's a bit much to expect of the masses, who are very often frustrated by Google/Search. I'm not running down the masses here. They want to get things done. We have very basic tools to help them, I'm arguing that our tools should be orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Sure it's hard, and while that response may be satisfying for engineers, that doesn't solve the problem people are trying to solve when they use Google/Search.

And honestly, there's just something plain wrong with your algorithm when it returns a news story as a top result for "facebook login". It's a safe bet that is NOT the result 99.999% of the users are looking for when they type that in. And if you're failing your users a very high percentage of the time, the problem simply does not lie with your users.

I honestly don't think I actually disagree with what you're saying; I just still don't see this as a "failure" on Google's part, and that was the impetus for the post. I don't think Google should have been expected to anticipate this sort of thing.

Learn from it? Sure. Expect it? I still don't think so.

This whole discussion can be summed up with "know your audience". If you have stupid people in your audience, you should design for stupid people; companies like Facebook and Google should design for stupid people, the rest of the world doesn't.

In the end, it's Google's responsibility to find the correct page for what it's users are looking for, even if they're using it as some sort of web-CLI for the wrong purpose. Google has the stupid people in its audience, so Google should design for them. Heck, Google should be able to detect a person's intentions; not sure if they can, but at least I guess it would be possible to classify websites as stupid and people as stupid, and match accordingly.

Can you actually design for stupidity without making the experience painful for people of more average intelligence?

Sidenote: Don't bring up geeks. Geeks are so far advanced on technological intelligence to be gods to the mere mortals around them.

I agree. You build a tool to solve a problem, not for the building sake. And if it turns out the consumers are using your tool for a different purpose, it is in your own interest to understand this new use and optimize your tool to fulfill that previously unnoticed problem.

if it turns out the consumers are using your tool for a different purpose, it is in your own interest to understand this new use and optimize your tool to fulfill that previously unnoticed problem.

Amen! That last bit is quotable!

I once read a story about a Chinese company who built washing machines and found that they were getting lots of warranty claims after people had broken them trying to wash potatoes. Instead of putting a notice on the machines not to use them to clean potatoes, they successfully developed and marketed a dual purpose machine.

http://www.connectedaustralia.com/News/Trends/tabid/121/sele...

That is exactly what I am talking about!

And yet to borrow from a commenter on the post. If you complain to a tool company about your hammer being a sucky screwdriver what exactly should the tool company to do? Make the hammer a better screwdriver? or point the user to the real screwdriver?

Sometimes the solution isn't to optimize your tool for something it can't do very well but to build a new tool that does do it well. I think turning Google the search engine into a site redirection service for keywords ala AOL falls into that category.

If you go to Home Depot with a hammer being a sucky screwdriver, they will replace it with a screwdriver--maybe the customer wasn't aware there was a better tool for that. Here google is home depot, not a hammer. Also, if your hammer is a sucky screwdriver and home depot doesn't have a screwdriver to exchange for your hammer, they better get some because otherwise the customer will go somewhere else. Finally, software is much more extensible than hardware, so the analogy is not exactly 1 to 1.

So what do you do if you're Home Depot and you try to tell your customer about screwdrivers and they stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "Nyaa nyaa I don't want to learn anything new"?

Put a screwdriver in their hand and let them try it for a month before paying for it.

That depends on how you slice the phrase "intended to." Google is not supposed to return whatever Page Rank spits out, it's supposed to return the most relevant page to the user's query. Page Rank is a means to an end. If Page Rank is returning an article about facebook logins, rather than the facebook login, for the search query 'facebook login,' I would not consider it to be working as intended.

I am with you on this. All the debate about user experience, proper tool for the job, etc. is interesting, but in what use case would it be valid to return any page higher than the actual Facebook login page for the query "facebook login"?

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.

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.

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