[ale] Users (Was: Re: I am so tired of Linux Fanatics)

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 15:24 -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> Here is a pretty good example. What do you mean by "login prompt"? I
> can't see your screen. Is this login prompt graphical or not? The
> answer lies in the details. 

This is the problem with users---and not even so much users directly, as
how they are (self?) taught to think about things when they are
introduced to a topic as complex as using an operating environment.

When you begin to interface with a system that is large and appears to
be unified and monolithic in nature, users tend not to think about
things like "a" login prompt, but "the" login prompt, as if there is
only one such type of thing.  That of course means that supporting these
users means that you have to make certain assumptions about the user,
what their knowledge is or lacks, and so forth, and that's just a long
bad road to go down.

I try to deal with it by subtly correcting people when they say things
that are indicative of typical thinking.  People over-generalize and
they remember things at the wrong levels.  Consider the fact that most
"users" think that the network *is* the Internet.  For example, if they
cannot print, and they know that their printer is attached to the
network, and they know that the network gets them to the Internet, then
they will say something along the lines of "the Internet is down".
Well, it sounds awfully stupid to reply to that with "which Internet"
since there is only one, so you have to craft questions carefully to try
to figure out what exactly they are trying to tell you.  Eventually, if
you're as lucky as you are hopefully skilled, you will determine that
they cannot print, though they can ping 4.2.2.1 and reach Google just
fine.  Somewhere along the way, they learned that the network is the
Internet.  That's not correct information, but they had learned it
nonetheless.

I suppose that means that if someone tells you that they can't tweet,
you have an infinitely more complex problem on your hands.  "What do you
use to tweet?"  "Twitter."  "How do you use Twitter?"  "I tweet, DUH."
"Do you use a program?"  "Yeah, the Internet, what else‽"  "#!@#%$!"

If there were some way to fix the problem en masse, that would be
awesome.  Until then, there are always going to be people who are far
too impatient with people who are willing to learn but suffering from
temporary ignorance.  Not everyone wants to learn every little detail
about their computer and how it runs, but sometimes they just want to
learn how to use it for their own day-to-day things.  The problem is
that many people assume that you want to control every tiny little
thing.  (Note that I'm *not* in the camp of "remove all settings and do
the right thing by default and make the behavior hardwired," just the
camp that not everyone needs to know about or tweak everything.)

	--- Mike