IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get
hackification.com
hackification.com
Some people still think shutting off the monitor means shutting off the computer - even in the case of a flat screen. I've seen this at least 5 times this year alone.
As a web developer the browser issue is the biggest and most consistent for me.
The fact that you don't think these differences still exist perfectly defines the purpose of this list.
Heh. I had this problem with my mom who could never understand that she could record on her VCR even if the TV was off. Or tuned to another channel.
"How did you do that?" she asked.
"I just pushed the power button. This button down here turns the computer on and off."
"But I always just pushed a button on the keyboard and it turned on."
And then I realized that she had never turned her computer off, only put it to sleep, for five years.
We never did manage to convince her...
You're right about the loudspeaker and the microphone example though, since in the most common cases loudspeakers are electromagnetic devices that convert electricity to air pressure in front of a cone, and vice versa.
In fact, almost every piece of electronics can function as a microphone (Coils, capacitors and so on), I built transmitters a long time ago and the measures you have to take to get rid of spurious microphony are pretty draconian.
I was waiting for a much more saucy version of your response after I realized there was some context missing ;)
They viewed the machine as a Magic Box that let them type documents and browse the web and sometimes crashed if they angered it. Some needed help getting CDs out of the tray. Some didn't know that "check if it is plugged in" is a troubleshooting step. Some were very superstitious about crashes ("don't move the monitor!" was my favorite).
If you don't see anyone struggling with these concepts, well, I haven't since I got a programming job 3 years ago. They didn't stop having problems, I just don't see the problems anymore. Always watch out for selection bias: the set of "people you know" isn't representative of the population at large
One can argue against some or all of it's points, but overall message is unarguable.
We are not our own target group. It's very difficult to look at website using mindeset of these people.
These days, it seems like people are increasingly uncomfortable disagreeing with each other: "I disagree" is often meant or interpreted as "You're wrong, and you should never have spoken up in the first place, you foolish whelp."
That's why I was really delighted to see a pair of contradictory opinions sharing the top of an HN comment list: it meant, cursorily, that every person who upvoted one did not automatically downvote the other, but also that the community as a whole values the disagreement itself. I know I'm making a mountain out of a molehill now, but only for the purpose of explaining why I wasn't being sarcastic.
But the crazy thing is that there no guarantee that a given user will or won't any one of these things - as well as no guarantee whether they will or won't other subtler things.
After all this, it actually makes me less inclined to pander to all the user's possible ignorances. Rather than worry every strange conception that users might have, we should create a UI which is self-consistent, powerful and hides as little as possible.
"Drag-and-drop" and "click versus double click" are two approaches which were created to make things "intuitive" but which are a disaster because they don't make any announcement of their presence and don't actually increase the number of options a user has. Hierarchical files and hierarchical menus may indeed not be "gotten" by some people but those people need to be educated and once they are, they use just about any standard-conformant GUI app whereas each time the latest visual-fu-metaphor is added to a given app, everyone will always need to parse it again.
Everything I have found is either hopelessly technical or stuffed with thousands and thousands of poor quality programs.
There are lots of individual sites, but no where that you can point someone that will take care of them.
. . . until someone double-orders something that costs $600.
Apparently Mosaic messed up this system and everyone else followed.
At least I think I recall reading that somewhere. Googling for web, double-click, link etc. gives you nothing of any use.
(Well, I'm joking in general, but I do this myself often enough.)
The best analogy I can find for RAM is short-term memory. RAM holds less stuff than long-term memory (hard disk), but is faster to access. And if you don't put an item into long-term memory (write to disk), you forget it (when the power is turned off). People seem to understand that.
You can't read stuff on a bookshelf; you have to take it out and put it on the table to open it. (Sure, you can read a book on a couch, but this is the computer we're talking about - it has certain rules.)
You can take out as many books from the bookshelf as you like, as long as they fit on the open table.
If you run out of table space, you need to make more space on the table, and the only way to do that is to put books back on the shelf.
If you're trying to open too many books at once with too little table space, the only thing you can do is constantly go back and forth between the bookshelf and the table, open the book, find your place, etc., read a word, take it back, open the previous book, write it down, etc., and it's going to take you way longer to do the same work.
Too bad memory is divided into "pages" and not "books".
I can't tell you how many times I've had users tell me that they got some variety of out of memory error, then immediately start describing how they tried to delete stuff from their hard drive to fix it. :-)
RAM is your desktop (literal desktop, as in the "top of your desk"). The more desk space you have, the more "things" you can be working on at the same time.
Disk Space is the file cabinet. Shutting down is like cleaning your desk, whatever doesn't get put back into the file cabinet gets thrown away.
> Making the problem worse is that fact that most consumer PCs are sold with the bare minimum of RAM.
Is this true still? I thought it was clever marketing to sell your laptop with 4 gigs and a 32 bit OS. Not only can the OS not address all that RAM, but it wont use all of it. To the uninformed consumer, which this article is about, they think 'Wow! 4 gigs?! This other one only has (n, where n < 4) gigs, so this 4 gig computer must be a better deal!"
This is going to become less common. Many PC manufactures are now making iMac-style, everything-jammed-into-a-flat-panel systems.
It's pretty easy to set up 'rules' for this:
* If there is a box attached to the monitor (under the desk or otherwise) then the box is the computer.
* If everything is plugged directly into the monitor, then the monitor is the computer.
It's pretty simple, but people either just don't care or have it stuck in their heads that 'this' is the way the world is... and some people's opinions don't turn on a dime.
What do you think the thing hanging down the back of your throat is for?
It's like someone knows that you're knowledgeable about a subject so they ask you a question, and you respond by informing them that most of what they think they know is wrong (and then telling them how things really are). Then they get pissed off and basically tell you that they know more about the subject than you do.
I like to use a desk metaphor when explaining disk vs. RAM to relatives, etc.
If the hard disk is the filing cabinet, the amount of RAM is like the size of your desk. You can take a file out of the filing cabinet and work on it at your desk. If you take out 5 files, you need a bigger desk. If you run out of room on the desk, you have to put files back in the cabinet, e.g. close the window. It's not a perfect metaphor but for some reason they usually get it much better than talking about RAM as "what your programs use."
EDIT: oops, it looks like I'm not the only one with this idea http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853104
I instantly thought of Dropbox - and they mentioned it two paragraphs later as a way to magically solve this problem.
I seriously can't praise Dropbox enough for its awesomeness.
Or maybe it all starts here and will snowball and take over.
On that note, it would be fascinating to see if there is a way to use a some sort of psychological profile and a standardized approach that would allow for programs to be customized for each individual. Yes, this is pretty pie-in-the-sky but Someday it would be a really interesting development.
Contrary to my findings I like your idea very much.
Maybe the proliferation of webapps is the first steep in this direction? Gathering massive amounts of data about using application by individual users plus tools used for behavioral analysis - maybe?
Example: Macintosh has several different options for how you interact with files (cover flow, collapsible folders, icons) If all of the programs that allow for file interaction knew that I am visual and prefer to see coverflow by default then I'd feel much more at home as an end user becasue my interactions become more consistent no matter what program I am using.
Other areas that could benefit: color usage/dialogue boxes.
Overall paradigms for file organization - I, for instance am very spatially aware, whereas many people would prefer rigid folder hierarchy as the method of choice for organizing and finding files.
Ignorance is understandable. I'm ignorant about all sorts of things. But what I don't get is willful ignorance.
So far so good.
But what to do to hear those who don't talk to us? Whose do not fill out feedback forms, don't reply to mails, don't talk on the phone?
They don't care enough to respond. They don't know how to respond.
But at least some of their insights are valuable. How to reach them?