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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.

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If those users aren't reading the error dialogs anyways, why do the error dialogs need to pander to those users? I wonder if the "make it dumb enough for every user to understand" approach leads to user comprehension plateauing prematurely.

Shareholder-driven growth targets mean it's no longer good enough to target the 20th percentile users, who might have reading comprehension at a 5th grade level. You have to hit the 10th percentile, or the 5th. Be glad that you still get text instead of pictures.

Tangentially related, I used to work at a company where the C level was demanding all of our help documents be videos. They couldn't understand that it made them unsearchable, took way more time, did not allow branching or decision making in the processes, if anything in the workflow or even UI changed the entire thing would need to be redone, takes up a ton of space, is not easily skimmable etc. "but it's easier than reading!" "are you telling me you've never learned how to do things on YouTube?" Etc. I refused and resigned not long after.

I was thinking you could do product demos / help videos combined as an acceptance test suite.

You would programmatically build the self help tutorial like a ui test (use a test browser and it would be like cypress/selenium). You would write a script, (ai) text to speech, and you could even respond to user input for branching.

These would be, de facto, your acceptance test suite and your tutorials will flag when they break on new ui developments, helping to keep them up to date

Sure, if they want to hire someone. Ain't nobody got time for that.

> Be glad that you still get text instead of pictures.

Even that isn’t a given. I’ve seen banks using emoji in their notifications. Companies are using ML to predict which emoji to change your text to. There are emoji domain names. Etcetera.

Counterpoint, when a random dialog asks for a password, the answer is not always "give the password", so maybe that's part of the reason why people find it so confusing.

When you can't open Outlook because you're getting an error, ya might need to fuckin sign in. This is sadly a common occurrence.

Half the people in my class in college don't know what Windows is. As in, they know they use a laptop. They don't know they are using Windows.

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