The Facts are Sad

I deal with end users quite a lot these days and I have come to a sad realization. As the Internet and computers were becoming more popular in the mid to late 90s and I was working at Gateway (was Gateway 2000 back then, they should never have changed their name, but I digress) I was under the false assumption that as society grew to use computers more often, they would be more proficient with them. I was sadly mistaken.

I used to think that once everyone had them in their home for a few years and used them on a regular basis they wouldn’t need the same level of support because they would learn to do some of these things themselves. That hasn’t happened. I think the reasons are many, but one of the major reasons I think for this is because people haven’t really been trained, and this is the fault of the “IT Community” as a whole.

For a long time, when someone asked about a computer problem, they would of course ask a “Nerd.” The crux of the issue here is that computer nerds don’t relate well to people. So when a “user” asked a question they were treated like they were stupid and it turned them off from asking more questions. Because computer nerds knew how files were stored on the computer, they incorrectly assumed that everyone else should understand it, so they responded as if they were being asked a stupid question. To put this in the perspective of the normal “user”, imagine being asked, “what are those folders on your desk for?” a hundred times. It wouldn’t long before you would start responding tersely to the question. This is essentially situation. Most people still don’t understand how files are stored on a computer or how applications are “installed.” Even recently I have come across younger users, those that grew up with Windows on a regular basis, who don’t understand some of these simple things. Honestly, I have played jokes on people by just moving things around on them. I didn’t delete anything, but when someone is used to something being where it was, they can’t find it when you move it. This is part of the problem with Windows Vista and Office.

When something on a computer, website, or application isn’t where the user expects it to be, they don’t go looking for it, they give up. I see this often with website redesigns, the repeat visitors don’t know where to find things because they have been relocated or have been renamed. In a sense when a site is redesigned, it’s important to keep as many of the original “words” as possible, in generally the same locations or order that they were on the previous site. Many times, the new design is better, however, because the user doesn’t understand it and they are too afraid to ask, it’s important to give them some sort of way to understand where things have been moved to. This can be done with either a link to the old site, or better, a new page on the site that explains the new interface and how it’s different than the old site and where to find the old information or content on the new site. For sites that link in from other places, you should build redirects to the same content on the new site so that the old links still work. This might sound like common sense, but it’s rarely done.