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Comment by atmavatar | Hacker News Reader

> They’re smart enough

I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.

I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.

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One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work".

What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect).

(I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)

The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner reminiscent of watching an F1 driver at work, the screen just a blur as their fingers dance over the keyboard.

Absolutely, the ones that are clearly trying more than make up for the rest imo, and some are stunning. There are a lot of them. And many of the rest are just having a bad brain day and need help rubber-ducking to see the thing right in front of them - we've all been there, many times.

This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.

> The world is fully of people who's intelligence

What an example of a sentence a person *whose intelligence is lower than you might expect would write. I can only imagine this was intentional.

Could you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?

I'm not the same person, but probably. There are at least two errors in the quoted fragment, though personally I don't think either is especially indicative of a lack of intelligence.

There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.

Ah sry - phone typing

This makes me think of "we're all just temporarily abled". This proves the point -- sometimes we're just typing on our phone, lol

Cognitive decline from age is something the SWE community also neglects to think about.

You may feel superior to the average IQ person right now, but we're all going to regress to that point & worse at some point.

Design software & plan your life accordingly.

I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.

That's even worse than the "I'm getting an error when I ..." type! ("...ok... What's the error?")

I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.

It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.

If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?

iOS has no (user-viewable) notification history?

Very limited: as soon as you have cleared a notification it is gone forever and old notifications are also gone rather quickly.

https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...

It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.

1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).

That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.

Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.

> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code

I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.

Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.

> they're almost always unhelpful.

Sounds like you found the real problem.

> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.

As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.

It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.

> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.

Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!

I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.

By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.

I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.

As an aside I really like video games that have a running log of everything characters have said. Persona 5 does this. It's a rare feature from my experience!

I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.

Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.

Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.

I was always soooo tempted to say "pretend I can't see whatever you're looking at right now..."

Reminds me of how people learning to draw/paint are told to flip the subject upside-down, to bypass their interpretation getting in the way of seeing.

There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.

Designing for the stupid users also makes life easier for the smart users. No matter what you are designing. It makes your product better.

Sometimes, not always.

It may result in power users losing some features.

Sure, but whenever you can make life easier for those who have are having hard time without making life harder for those who aren't, you should do it.

For example, no power user benefits from having to use work arounds to make a product function. It's an annoyance to them, and it's an insurmountable obstacle to others.

Oh, I agree with that. Just dispute claim that any improvement for newbies is improving things also for experts.

Not necessarily. Interface design is a communication medium. A skilled designer can often communicate to multiple types of users solving different types of problems. When an interface is “dumbed down,” it’s usually because a non-designer was trying to ‘clean it up’ or make it pretty by removing what they didn’t need and ignoring what everybody else needs. It’s difficult, and that’s why it’s a distinct field with its own degrees and professional programs.

The claim was broader, specifically "Designing for the stupid users also makes life easier for the smart users. No matter what you are designing"

it can be in fact improvement for both but in many cases it is not

Wild to me and speaks volumes of HN/SWEs that this is getting downvoted.

That's trivially false. There's a large difference between products designed primarily to have a low learning curve, and products designed to maximize the efficiency of users that have been trained in its use.

The only products which should have any mandatory learning curve are products which actually allow an expert to do something out of the ordinarily, which simply could not be done with an easy to use product. Such as some musical instruments.

Otherwise, you can most of the time make a product which can be easy to use for novices while retaining maximum efficiency for experts.

Compare a professional trader's UI to something consumer-grade like Robinhood, or analytics UIs designed for marketers (exposing only a few cute graphs with a handful of predefined parameters) to the dashboards used in physics labs, or simple graphics programs vs. Blenders.

Maximum efficiency for experts requires removing information that would be distracting and redundant for them, but essential for novices to understand the working model of the program, so you're pretty much wrong.

Smart users forced to use work arounds may also find the workaround is to switch to your competitors product !

> I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.

In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have this policy, I don't know.)

It shaped attitudes and cultures quite a bit.

The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.

>The net effect has been to make me hate customers

So what every support person lives thru on every day of work.

And really being a good support person involves figuring out what bucket the customer belongs in.

"Customers that are smarter than you and if they are talking to you, your shit is wrong somehow"

"Customers that are smart in general, but need some guidance accomplish more complex tasks"

"Customers that aren't very smart, but handholding works to solve their problems"

"Customers that are dumb, realize they are dumb, and persistent at being dumb"

and finally the worst

"Customers that think they are smart and are belligerent if their intelligence is questioned as they are doing something horrifically stupid"

Oh, I don't think MathWorks has a regular rota. As far as I remember, You do your duties when you join, and then you are free.

I wish it was just users. I once had to explain to a PM on client's side for 10 minutes that no, the software can't split $1.00 into three exactly equal invoices and we need to put that remaining $0.01 somewhere. In the end it seemed like he's given up without understanding the nature of the problem and escalated to have someone higher up to tell us to add it to the last invoice.

Well, software doesn’t exist for its own sake, the sake of the people that made it, or the sake of some kind of exclusive smartypants club. The purpose is to solve problems or accomplish tasks for people— some of whom are not cognitively gifted. A good interface will take everybody that needs it into account, including people that need less handholding if the usage is different enough.

> there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough

The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that. Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble.

People of varying intelligence levels can operate a motor vehicle and yet software can't be designed well enough for them? The failure may be on the SWEs.

The thing is that good interface design is basically invisible, so most people, developers notwithstanding, take it for granted. In the late 90s, there were entire books published on using popular email clients like Eudora, but a literal child can figure out how to use, say, fastmail entirely through feature self-discovery, and fastmail has more features!

I also think the ego stroking borne from disproportionately high labor demand has given many developers a serious case of main character syndrome.

There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle.

Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.

Sure software moves fast, but it also moves slow.

How many bad UX redesigns do major desktop/phone OSes need for their phone/text/mail/photos apps?

We're at least 30 years into email apps for example, and yet the UX changes year to year for.. reasons.

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