ID10T Error? Or Idiot UI Design? You decide…
Ok, this is going to sound completely sappy, but I swear it’s the truth…
About a year ago, I moved into my current apartment. It’s a cool little one-bedroom upstairs apartment with a view of the mountains, an almost-view of the beach, within walking / running distance of pretty much anything I need and a really awesome patio that I can chill on with friends. In short, it’s the prototypical bachelor pad. I loved this place the moment I saw it, and even hit it off with all my new neighbors from pretty much the first day I moved in.
One of my neighbors who I’ll call Nancy lives directly below me. She’s literally a sweet little old lady who is very kind and very wise. She’s also disabled, so she doesn’t drive, can’t see all that well and generally needs a little more help than the average person. I don’t mind of course, as we became fast friends right from the beginning. Whenever I cook and have extra left over, I make her a plate, since she really can’t cook. When she needs her trash taken out, I help her out with that. Furniture moved, can’t reach something on a shelf, TV goes on the fritz – you name it, I get a call. And, it’s all good! I like helping other people out anyway, and she’s not only very grateful for any help she can get, but she also doesn’t abuse the privilege by calling me very 10 minutes just for the company. So of course, when she needs help with her computer – an ancient PC running Windows Millennium Edition (bless her heart!) I’m the guy she calls.
When I first moved in, she didn’t have Internet access – didn’t want to pay the extra cash on the cable bill as she’s on a fixed income, and didn’t know enough about it to even really ask for it. So, of course, I setup her PC to connect to my wireless router securely and she gets her Internet for free from me, so as it turns out, I’m her ISP as well. Once that was all fixed up for her, she was able to get on the Internet for the first time in her life and I’ve been giving her pointers on how to do things like surf the web, check e-mail, all the “normal people” stuff that normal people do.
Now, it goes without saying that Nancy – being in her 60′s now – is not what you would consider to be part of the Computer Generation, so it’s really hard sometimes for her to explain a problem – not her fault, of course. So where is is all going is that yesterday she calls me up and asks if I can look at her computer, claiming that she had some kind of e-mail problem but of course didn’t know exactly what it was. Normally, I’d just pop down stairs and have the problem fixed in two minutes, but in this case I was all the way across town, so she’s trying to explain what’s going on over the phone. I began asking her a series of very simple “yes or no” question about what she was seeing / doing so that I could get some idea as to what she was talking about (I find this to be a very useful technique when trying to get non-technical people to communicate technical issues to me, rather than trying to have them explain exactly what they see.) After a few minutes of this, it became apparent that I’d simply have to take a look for myself as trying to figure out what was going on over the phone just wasn’t getting anywhere – again, not her fault.
Later that afternoon, I got home, made some lunch and then I popped in to visit Nancy and see if I could help her out with her computer conundrum. She uses AOL for her e-mail which is what I set her up with since I figured that it was simple enough for her to use and at the same time she’d be in a cyber-environment that wasn’t too daunting for someone of her skillset. As I sat down to take a look, she again tried to explain to me what kind of issue she was having. According to her, she was trying to send an e-mail so someone and it kept getting bounced back. When I took a look at what she show me, I had to fight the urge not to laugh out loud…
The way that Nancy was interpreting what she saw on the screen was not the way it was intended to be read. To the typical computer user or power user, there’s be no question that there was a notification in green that read, “Message Sent!”, and to the right of that a blue button that read, “Back to address list”. However… the way Nancy – definitely not a power user and barely able to surf the web – red this was.. “Message sent back to address list” – just like that. Somehow or another, she didn’t put two and two together and realize that the object on the right-hand side of that line was a button!
Now, I know… there’s alot of geeks out there that would call this a classic ID10T error, in typical condescending true-to-form computer geek fashion, and yea… I have to admit that there was a time that I’d probably have reacted that way as well. On the other hand… if Nancy is having this problem, then how many other people might be having an issue like this?
The problem is essentially that the UI presented expects a certain functional knowledge level – i.e., that the user understands the difference between a button and a line of text. But, this isn’t always the case, and if you where to put yourself in Nancy’s shoes – an inexperienced, elderly, disabled computer user who is bombarded by an array of flashing, blinking, smiley-faced, multi-colored thingies all over the screen – then you might be able to see that there’s a problem with this.
Good UI design makes sure that the user can easily discern one object on the screen from another, and from my perspective, I would have never given this a second’s notice when I saw that – I know what a button is, and I know what plain text is (for me it’s practically embedded in my DNA at this point). I also know that AOL probably isn’t going to change alot for the sake of the sweet little old lady who can barely use her computer. But, considering the rapid expansion of the Internet and not only the volume but the type of users that are accessing it more frequently – in many, many cases, people who have never even used the Internet or sent an e-mail – it might be wise at some point for AOL, if not all of us, to take into consideration that not all users are power users. Maybe.. there’s alot more Nancy’s out there than we’d like to think.
Just sayin…
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