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Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

Non-savvy users really get lost at how screenshots work.

I have a buddy who's a programmer at publishing house, specializing in niche magazines, and they deal regularly with non-savvy older users. He's got this story about one such customer who was complaining that something wasn't working on the website and when asked to send a screenshot he proceeded to:

1) Press PrintScreen 2) Paste it into Word 3) Print it out, and finally, 4) Fax it to the company.

I thought that was kind of related, and rather humorous.

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I REGULARLY receive photos from cameras of someones computer screen when asked to supply a "screen shot". It was kinda funny the first few times...now its just sad.

One time, my kernel was crapping out and endlessly printing stuff I couldn't read because it was scrolling WAY to fast and ctrl+s did not work either, so I photographed my screen to be able to read what the kernel was trying to tell me (hardware defect).

Once, we had an issue with a single board computer that seemed like a hardware issue so we called support, and they wanted the output of a logical analyzer. Unfortunately, we didn't have an interface for our old analyzer, and so we set up a webcam to show the analyzer screen to the support guy over NetMeeting. It was kind of funny, but worked great.

The best one I saw, though not really a screenshot, was a photo on Craigslist... someone had used his cell phone to take a photo of a car he was selling, then used a web cam to take a photo of the cell phone screen, and then uploaded that.

The sad thing is that it's not intuitive to non-geeks -- not that they are creative and find ways to make it happen.

"Cntl-PrintScr" is not an intuitive command to most people. Pressing the shutter button on a digital camera is.

Maybe this is a larger UI point than the author intended -- I'm not sure that the PC, Mac, or iPhone commands are the best way to solve the problem.

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