You Aren't Average | Hacker News Reader

You Aren't Average

seobook.com

55 pointsbyrneseyeview32 comments

This was posted some time ago, and the comments there are interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662105

I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662151 :

  More and more, producers of programs are hiding the
  details, making it easier for people to just get on
  with things and solve their problems, without having
  to worry about the details of how it happens, and the
  machinery underneath.

  Then others, no doubt technical people, go and interview
  the users in order to show just how ignorant they all are.

  Did I get that right?

  If you want to make computers and services easy to use,
  you don't want people to be able to answer these questions.
  You want people to find your service, use it, and remain
  completely unaware of the technology.

So while it's true that you are not average, the ignorance these people are showing is exactly the ignorance being given to them, forced on them, by makers of programs. And said makers are proud of that - their programs are "easy to use" and "intuitive."

Don't laugh and deride people for becoming exactly what you make them become. Be proud that you've done your job so well that they don't know what a browser is.

Why should they know? Everything is "intuitive."

I worked on the online strategy of a non-profit campaign in my country.

The people I worked with were really smart, but when it came to writing web articles other people could read, they were blissfully ignorant.

The CMS I built had an intuitive interface with a WYSIWYG editor. I made the choice to have less functionality than TinyMCE because their already written articles were terrible ... no correct alignment, no intuitive paragraphs, verbose sentences that could make you yawn from the first 5 seconds, content that used medical jargon, and complete disregard for their audience.

I tried to write them emails explaining to them what one should or shouldn't do when publishing to the web. I trained them face to face. No effect.

I later discovered that they copy/pasted the documents from MS Word. The copied text carried over Word's formatting, and because it didn't look like in Word, they tried to make it look better by visual editing, or by totally ignoring the results.

One day I deactivated the WYSIWYG editor, telling them that they should learn HTML. Enough to say that they were so upset that I'm now no longer helping them with anything.

I'm not even talking about using technology here. I'm talking about basic skills you need when writing a clear essay ... kids are supposed to learn this stuff in school.

This is not necessarily about people being trained by us to be ignorant. This is something more deeper than that ... people are becoming lazier and more ignorant and disconnected from their work and the world at large. Maybe it's information overload. Maybe it's the paradox of choice. I don't know.

I see your point here and I mostly agree. However, as a software engineer I am constantly learning the "machinery underneath" and it frustrates me to see people make absolutely no attempt to learn even the basics. I mean "A piece of software" would suffice as a response to his question. I guess I know what my mechanic must feel when he deals with me.

"Why did you switch to Firefox?"

"My friend came over to my house, deleted all my other browsers, and said "You're using Firefox now"

Classic! That's a good friend. How often have I wanted to do the same thing!

I gave my grandfather Chrome and renamed it to Internet Explorer. It worked.

As an aside, the Firefox 3.6 beta came out recently and it might be the first Firefox on the Mac that doesn't suck. I was very pleasantly surprised.

I've been very impressed with Firefox on the Mac, as I find Safari terribly buggy and unresponsive. It should really use the Camifox (Camino) theme as default though.

The theme still disappoints me. Camino's not much better; Safari still beats anything on the Mac (I'm still using it as my default). But they finally added smooth scrolling, which was the major killer for me earlier. It made using Firefox a pain.

I am that friend.

Are you "that" friend? What are the chances?

i hope he/she ported over bookmarks and preferences too, rather than starting a fresh new Firefox install

That video is a little frightening. However I wonder how Scott introduced himself. "I'm from Google, do you know what a browser is?" may be a slightly leading question if the audience is already unsure.

We often live in happy little techie bubbles where perhaps the only clueless intruder is our grandma or uncle, this video does remind us we should get out once in a while and talk to real people who use AOL broadband and have never heard of Google Crown.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article is pretty obvious once you've realised not everyone's as clued up as you are. Lowest common denominator. Next!

"asked 50 people on the street [...] Less than 8% of people surveyed did."

Wait, less than exactly 4 people? So 3 people? So exactly 6%?

It's possible that "50 people" was an approximation, and he actually asked "somewhat more than 50"...

This should be breakdown into age groups to make it more accurate in a sense.

I'm starting to see why all those internet scammers make money.

Yes. The solution is education, not dumbing everything down. If you treat people like they're dumb, they will act the part.

Yeah, because education is so effective.

Not for you, I guess.

You had the choice between attacking my statement by citing a few successful public education campaigns (there aren't many) or attacking me.

You attacked me. Wonderful way to convince others about your point.

The lack of a successful "education campaign" does not mean that education is a bad idea. It just means we haven't done it right yet.

And probably won't. Look at this loud minority of people who text while driving, think the EM field will give them cancer, are opposed to nuclear energy... I suggest the government to allow people get scammed, _do_nothing_ about it. Abolish laws against fraud; people will be more careful, knowing there's no saving net at the end.

Let's also legalize murder. If you make someone mad enough to kill you, you deserve to die. Society doesn't need a "safety net".

So what they're saying is, the least computer-literate people use non-Google search engines, and are more gullible. Deeply discouraging. Sure, if you run a startup, you want to get people to give you money, so this is probably grand news: let's check the referrer logs and give Bing users a giant flashing ad that tells them they're the 1,000,000th visitor! But as someone who wants to users move forward in general, it's pretty damn sad.

It gives us a flash of reality.

We have to face the reality and act accordingly. Our A/B testing will tell us which course of action is better.

These two quotes resonate with me the most and describe what we should all strive for in our online services:

"Your website design should ask nothing more of the user than a car does. Assume nothing, other than the user will point and click something obvious."

"Skype. Amazon. Ebay. All the big, successful internet plays took an everyday task the user already undertakes, and puts that task in an online context."

Cars are sometimes quite unintuitive. A lot of website do a better job.

Nobody is his own target group.

Well, almost. Eat own dog food ... etc.

But sticking to this approach limits severely size of target population.

Throwing mud at the wall and finding what sticks. It has one major disadvantage. It costs in time and money.

Any solutions?

Maybe Customer Development and Agile. Maybe something else.

The question is still open.

This is written about SEO, but applies about as well to anyone else involved in selling things online.

i have no earthly idea what point this post is trying to convey. if it's a reactionary post to the anti-seo sentiments expressed by developers, it fails. is the future of SEO in user-experience? is this post aimed at seo practitioners? regardless, i call bullshit.

I may not be average, but http://mylifeisaverage.com/

And I'm sorry, but I just couldn't resist that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com