Are Users Really Stupid?
As a designer I heard numerous times that users are stupid. They don’t understand obvious things, they don’t read the instruction and so on. I bet you heard or even said this phrase too. What’s wrong with it? While it’s at least offensive to users, it’s also not true. Let’s uncover why we say so and why users aren’t stupid at all.
Why we say that users are stupid
The answer is pretty easy — because we don’t know how our users think. We don’t know what’s in their minds. We don’t know if this new cool feature is easy to understand for them. It’s clear to us how it works. And we expect that it’d be also as clear to our users too.
This is called the curse of knowledge. It’s a cognitive bias that occurs when we assume that other people have the same level of expertise as we do. We know our products the best, we know every tiny detail and it’s obvious for us how it works. And we expect the same understanding from the other people. We feel frustrated when users interact with our product the way we didn’t expect.
And as a reaction to this, we can either admit our lack of knowledge or blame users that it’s their fault. The second way is easier to choose and feel good about yourself instead of facing the truth. It’s linear thinking — finding easy solutions to complicated problems. As a designer, you should use the system thinking — look at a problem as a system with its complicated connections and elements.
Why users are not stupid
All our actions are based on deeply rooted strategies, views, and beliefs. They are called mental models. These models exist in our mind and control our actions. We base these models on our previous experience and use them to predict and explain everything around us.
When we meet something new, our mind looks for a suitable mental model to understand how it works. If it finds the right one, we can predict how to interact with it. This thing seems clear and intuitive to us. We feel pleasure working with it. If it doesn’t — we feel frustration and have to build new models. Building new models is hard because it requires involving the reflective system of our mind.
Humans have two types of thinking — intuitive and reflective. Intuitive thinking is automatic, it’s quick and receives information from instincts. We use the automatic system most of the time in situations that don’t need their attention. The reflective system is slow and self-conscious. This system works on analyzing, finding cause-effect relationships and making conscious decisions. It needs time and efforts to get involved. That’s why it’s so hard to learn something new and why we stick to familiar conceptions. And if you want your users to easily understand and use your product with pleasure, you should recon their mental models and attitudes.
The Apple Lisa was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface for users. It used a clear analogies from the real world in its interface — folders for documents, trash bin for deleted files etc. These analogies don’t exist in computer litrally, it’s a level of abstraction. But it helps users to apply their mental models of working with real documents and interfaces to the virtual one. And helped them to understand and successfully use such a new and compicated thing as computer for everyday use.
Products are for people, not people for products
The worldview of humans is limited by the information available now, and thus they do not seem to be consistent and logical like rational users. It’s a huge temptation to say that people are inattentive and lazy. They don’t want to pay attention, read the instruction (“It’s all there!”) and so on. But you know what? Users don’t have to do this.
We make products for people, not fitting people to products. We can give users the product and say “Hey, you better deal with it”. Or we can say “You, you are important to us. Your problems, your desires. And we want this product to help you with it.” You don’t need to be Einstein to realize which way will work better for business. Respect your user and they will respect you. You have to step aside from your own perceptions and ambitions. Because we make products for people, not for ourselves.
As an example let’s take a look at two ATMs. The first one gives you money first and after that, you can take your card back. The second one urges you to take your card back first and only after that it gives you money. The problem of the first ATM is that it assumes that users will never forget to take their cards back. But it doesn’t assume that people will be more concerned about counting received money. That they can be easily distracted by other people, cell phones, thoughts, and emotions. The second ATM uses a perfect nudge to reduce this error — you can’t forget your card if you haven’t take your money. You can’t forget to take your money because that’s your main goal in this situation.
I recommend designers to learn more from sociology, psychology and economics. This will help you to better understand how people think and make decisions. And this will help you to build better products and make people happier.
Recommended books:
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
- The Art of Systems Thinking by Joseph O’Connor and Ian McDermott
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
