Night Apes Dream

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 recently wrote a piece on bad site design and the difficulty of users completing their tasks on sites that do not take user need into account. His article, If Your Users Fail, Your Website Fails, Regardless Of Intent Or Design is a follow on piece to his describing the difficulty of finding relevant content on a local newspaper’s website. Essentially Karp was seeking localised content from a local new source, but found that this information was not only hard to find but also hidden behind a sign in process for registered users. Whilst the article itself, like all of Karp’s writing, is worth reading, what really caught my attention was the tone of some of some of the comments in reaction to the piece. A number of people posted comments essentially saying “Well I can find the personalised homepage and the content you sought, so you must simply be a stupid user.”

This is something that pops up in my work every now and then, and always catches me by surprise. Clients who come to view our user testing sessions and watch users struggling with their site simply dismiss the subjects at “stupid users”. What’s funny about this is it is absolutely right as well as the most idiotic thing you could ever say.

So the user in testing was stupid, fair enough. They also fit the profile of your standard customer pretty perfectly. Could it be that your customers are stupid?

Despite an increased acceptance of the need for user testing and user centred design, there still seems a degree of failure to accept the results that come back are based on real users. Frequently scenarios arise that go something like this:

Me: “Users showed difficulty locating content/feature/section”

Developer: “But it’s right there, behind the that green button”

Me: “True, but no one clicked on that button”

Developer “But everyone in the office knew to click on it! And it’s the same button design that Digg/Flickr/Google are using”

Me: Yes, but your users don’t work in a design agency, and your site is not Digg/Flickr/Google your actually selling maternity wear to 50+ year old retired sailors. Not quite the Digg crowd.”

To return to the beginning of this post. The issue with Scott Karp and his local paper may or may not be that the site should have catered to his needs. Perhaps a thorough test of the site revealed that virtually no users wanted local content without first having to register and then sign in, and I’mcertainly not going to enter the argument for how newspapers currently handle their on line content. The issue that I raise is that of dismissing a poor user experience as out of the ordinary. So everyone in testing used your site like total morons? Well, the world is full of morons and they’ve all got disposable incomes so get on board and make a site for morons. There are no stupid users, just those who can find stuff on your site and those who cannot. So instead of dismissing those who cannot as stupid why not embrace them, build sites that they like to use, use language that speaks to them, graphics that are appealing and suggestive and an architecture that is intuitive? Do this and I guarantee that in your next round of testing all users will somehow be magically less stupid.