Working with users and their problems on a daily basis and developing new features for them to use, I’m becoming more and more envious of their ignorance regarding computers. I simply, for a long time, couldn’t wrap my mind around some of the issues they ware having, and I failed to understand how they couldn’t use a feature that was painfully obvious for me to take advantage off. But then I figured out that the problem was not in the users, but in me.
I have all this knowledge (no self indulgence intended here) about user interfaces, how they work and how you can use them most effortlessly. I learned all this while learning how to program, how the computer works, etc. Where normal users just want to see the dancing bunny, I want to know how is it that I can see it.
Users are mostly unaware of keyboard shortcuts, tabing between form elements and alt tabing between windows, to give a few examples of what I’m on about. A regular user hasn’t got a clue what a “cookie” is and why he can’t login because he has them disabled.
Ok, so now to the point of this. I was wondering the other day, if it wouldn’t be better to learn the ins and outs of a computer after being a normal user for a couple of years first. That way I would experience all the difficulties of UI’s and then later on, when I would learn my computer skills and I would be designing a new UI, I would remember what bothered me then, what kind of problems I had and I could make the UI more efficient.
It’s too late now, obviously, and I doubt one would have much luck convincing me to stop learning something I love when I first started taking interest in computers. As far as I can see, the best way to understand regular users is to listen to them, observe them, and treat them with respect and not being arrogant to them. That is what I do now, I always seek opportunities to observe someone while he use a UI (may it be mine or somebody else’s) and I always try to solve a problem one is having, hoping to learn something new along the way. A long learning process, but someday I hope it will make a better programmer out of me.