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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I think you overestimate the degree to which non-technical users await, with bated breath, a pronouncement about programming languages from high officials at Apple.

I love non-technical users. I was trying to explain to one of them yesterday that they can still use my website even after their school wipes their hard disk, and separately, even though the email address (login) is their home email address and not their school email address. She was quite convinced that I didn't understand the situation, because she was going to lose "all of her memory except the Hotmail at Google", like the tech guy told her.

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I had precisely the same discussion yesterday with a new client. She didn't understand how our web application did not have a larger list of system requirements. She started repeating the situation in a louder, slower manner to help me understand.

Patrick, you should totally write a book of quotes from your encounters with users. It will be really insightful and such a good laugh.

Tech folks are cynical enough without my help.

Here's all the insight I can muster: non-technical people do not have an accurate mental model of how the computer works. They have a semi-accurate mental model of the steps they take to do routine things on the computer: I click this thing, then I type in this thing, then I click this thing, then the magic happens. Deviations from that routine will almost certainly cause task failure.

Example: you know how Macs have the menu bar at the top of the screen rather than at the top of the window? I have at least one customer whose mental model is that the screen ends where stuff stops getting painted to it, and then that grey gunk above it is scary computer stuff. It took a day to talk her through finding the Help menu -- "It says Help, at the top right of your screen" because she was looking under the grey gunk bar and literally did not notice it until I returned the screenshot she had taken with a big red arrow on it.

What I always say to non-technical people:

All the programs and data in your computer is in files and folders, even windows is just a bunch of files. You understand this and everything else is far easier to understand.

Well then, the iPad must be impenetrably difficult.

The iPad reduces everything to what the users currently understand: the sequence of steps they take.

I don't think anyone would ever have the need to remove the Badoo icons software from his/her iPad.

My comment was only intended to be about desktop computers.

I thought it would help reduce the cynicism and help programmers make a better mental model of their users (because that's what we've got all wrong at the moment).

This blog of anonymous IT staffers' actual stories is quite illuminating:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sharky

http://clientsfromhell.net/

Is this what you're looking for?

Had a friend who was certain he could make a million dollars selling subscriptions to Google.

Met a guy at a party last month who said I could make lots of money on the internet! Apparently, if you're good at websites you can put ads on them and make a ton of cash. Who knew!

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