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> They’re smart enough

I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.

I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.

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One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work".

What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect).

(I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)

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The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner reminiscent of watching an F1 driver at work, the screen just a blur as their fingers dance over the keyboard.
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Absolutely, the ones that are clearly trying more than make up for the rest imo, and some are stunning. There are a lot of them. And many of the rest are just having a bad brain day and need help rubber-ducking to see the thing right in front of them - we've all been there, many times.
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There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.
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Nobody reads the docs. This will be even more true soon as LLM generated docs become more popular. I once read a user report "would be nice if I could move large Xs to uncover Y", filed a bug report myself to add the feature, and then realized that feature was already added and documented months ago, by me! I just updated it with an unobtrusive prompt/instruction to the UI when relevant. I definitely get lazy sometimes, but if you don't take the extra step to make sure a feature is easily discoverable and understandable in the UI, you're wasting almost all of its potential benefit.
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I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.

Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.

This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").

This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.

Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.

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I love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.
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Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, got me into usability tests with real users, and how to get it in place in a corporate environment. It's shocking to watch real users use software.
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