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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted

but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person.

You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.

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The product's design is the tool you use to distinguish.

Say that, unbeknownst to you, 90% of your users are non-native English speakers. Is a non-native English speaker "stupid" because they misinterpret the simple English idioms, metaphors, and symbology sprinkled throughout your product?

A group of actually-stupid-but-native English speakers might exhibit the same behavior.

You hypothesize that you have a large percentage of non-native English speakers using your app and change the design to accomodate. Behavior improves, distinguishing the bulk of your users from merely "stupid" English speakers.

The problem is that if you conceptualize your users as "stupid" the hypothesis that something else might be going on _never even enters your head_. You never do the experiment. Or, if you do, it's not faithful to an alternative model and is basically a wild stab in the dark.

This is a really good point. “Stupid” is a fun and dramatic framing (I will sometimes use “drunk user” as the equivalent), but it’s also reductionist and less useful for specific design decisions. Thinking deeply about why they are operating at less than peak efficiency helps you make decisions that accommodate those reasons.

Or sleep deprived, to be less judgemental.

Imagine your user was not able to sleep on a Trans-Pacific flight in bad weather, they have hay fever and a very sore neck.

Better yet, get user studies.

> whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product

No.

An idiot giving you 100% will never learn your product.

A genius giving you 1% will eventually develop a highly optimized way to use your product.

If we assume all users are the former, we never design for the latter. That pretty much sums up the last 20 years of de facto UX.

And if you disagree, I'd recommend you go find a call center still using mainframe apps, and watch a random sample of 100 users.

>eventually

perhaps, if the user is a continual user. but most users of most products are infrequent, and if your UI relies on being learned over time, it's probably not going to work for most people.

"Not going to work for most people" in this context feels more like "going to impact my growth metrics."

Which, yes, probably. But there are more goals in software development than hyper growth.

Particularly if your growth metric is number of registered users, silently ignoring those who didn't delete their account (almost nobody ever does). Following such metric prioritizes first-use experience (i.e. baiting registrations with UI glitter) over actual utility. Which is what I suspect happens a lot today (along with its related problem, optimizing for sale over continued use).

That only applies to... niche stores and food ordering, maybe.

If you're working on SaaS that is meant to help someone make money or work faster, there's a good chance you'll have people using your software as a part of their dayjob - i.e. 2-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. If you treat your users as idiots and don't implement space for them to grow (i.e. power user features), you'll be wasting a lot of life for a lot of people (and a lot of money of their bosses).

That's a heuristic I'd like to see being used in UX design: assume your software becomes a tool in some company, and you have full-time users spending their workday on it. Design to that group.

What you are talking about is consumer entertainment. Even utility apps like Google Maps are something you have to learn and yes I'm tired of all the "What's new! Don't do anything until you click me!" garbage. I need the app to open, do what I want, and then close. Thank-you.

Completely agree and your call center example is dead on. I work in telephony and our feedback from clients is always to simplify displays and reports so that they can manage the call flows better.

It was hilarious watching some of the reactions in our team when a client gave us a screenshot that was just boxes with numbers in them arranged neatly with no more than red/yellow/green for colors. Some saw ugly... I saw enhanced productivity.

Personally I think more UI/UX designers need to spend time doing data entry with time constraints so they learn the pains of repeated useless actions and time wasting features.

It’s qualitatively different in that one assumes that your product deserves 100% of anyone’s attention and the other doesn’t.

In most situations most of the time, your code is between someone and something they want. Your main importance in their life is when you fuck it up, not when you get it right. You just aren’t that important. The user is.

Which is partly why we need books championing good design. Because good design gets out of the way, and would go mostly unnoticed if not for other designers and aficionados giving them kudos.

> whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product.

I disagree that you have to make the same decisions. I think you need to design your product contextually. Sometimes, users might be giving you 100% of their capacity, sometimes they will only give you 1%. It depends on context and motivation. I'm working on a personal finance app. Sometimes, users are in a "I just want to make sure that latest transaction isn't fraud"-mode and you'll have seconds of attention. But sometimes (albeit much more rarely), users are in a "I want to sit down and think about my financial future mode".

> "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing...

I hope not, but unfortunately, I've often found that it is.

I think the idea is about developer attitudes. I've heard variations of "the user is dumb" too many times to count in the last 15 years.

People who think about users as idiots dismiss their issues. People who think about them as distracted change app design.

At least in my experience, the two ways of framing users lead to different behavior of development team.

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