Now in my chosen profession as a software developer I often am confronted with the trickiest, and often the most unfixable bug—user error. Sometimes it’s the result of a poor user interface, unintuitive design, but more often than not, it’s just the user giving up after one failed attempt at using the software and claiming “it doesn’t work.” Usability experts would probably scream at me and say the issue is almost always an interface that doesn’t comply with HCI best practices.
User error often results in a very cryptic bug request being sent to me like “it doesn’t work,” or “I can’t login.” Ok, well when designing a system all login cases are considered and an error message it returned if login has failed. Account doesn’t exist, incorrect password, user is not active, something like that. Please at the very least explain what the end result of your failed login attempt was, don’t tell me the “thing doesn’t work,” or “it’s broken.” There are processes involved in software development and in order to debug something the user needs to remember and note the steps taken to produce an unexpected result.
The lesson to be learned is that when writing software, you always need to build it for the lowest common denominator…the dumbest user that’s going to use your system. To be a little more politically correct we’ll call them technologically challenged. You know who they are. George W. is probably one of them…he calls it the “Internets.” come on George, the guy you ran against in 2000 invented the damn thing, if you keep calling it the wrong thing, he’s going to turn it off.