Web developers think you're stupid

Bingo! Amen! It's amazing how simple this idea is yet how difficult it seems for many to understand.

Absolutely! This is one thing that I think Newsvine has got down - it's simple and easy to use, but not simplistic. I'm a new, er, user, but so far I've been very impressed with the feature set.

I agree with showing them a bit of respect, especially if they buy something from you but they are still idiots.

I totally disagree.

Every single business wants to appeal to the largest demographic it possibly can. Why develop a product only for people who what TV show x when you can develop a product for people who watch TV. It is just common sense.

If a "user" is not smart enough (And believe me, there are millions of dumb people on the internet) to understand your product, then that is a potential sale gone. Sure, it'd be nice for every product to be custom fitted to you. But it'd only be nice for you. One person. These type of decisions are ones that can be made subconciously by most people.

Most products assume that you are an idiot because that if you aren't an idiot, you won't mind that much having to press an extra button or two. And for the idiot out there, it is great feature. It helps them and teaches them about the product.

Sure, it'd be nice if every person had enough time to educate themselves about everything about the internet but some of the most important (richest in this case) people are the ones who don't have the time to figure things out by themselves. One website should be good enough for one task.

Basically, you should look at this from the idiot's point of view. A lack of information is infinitely times worse than too much.

Although well written, this article is fluff. It's well understood in the developer community that calling users stupid is a hyperbolic way of saying that they don't navigate the web as intuitively. You spend your entire article trying to cast developers as stereotypical, all the while stereotyping the developers yourself.

If the fact that web designers think you're stupid keeps you up at night, lowers your self-esteem, or bothers you an any way, there's some sort of problem with your psyche.

I don't care if web developers think I'm slow and ugly. If it keeps them on track in creating usable designs, good for them. I'm a web developer. A lot of people think all web developers are geeky computer nerds. Should that bother me? Not at all, and it doesn't.

Tim, I run a design and usability consultancy and have been in this business for over 15 years. You might be surprised at the kinds of things I've witnessed during testing and research. It's really less about users being stupid and more about developers not having the same mindset of the person using the application or service. There's a disconnect. The consumer/user (whatever you want to call them) simply doesn't think like the developer, typically. And hence the problem.

Companies try the support and training model, but that's broken and costly. If applications were designed based on the customers' current behaviors, users wouldn't be stupid, developers would be smarter and companies would save a great deal of money on training and support.

BTW, one of the best ways to tackle this problem is through good customer research and the development and use of personas throughout the design process.

Ugh. I'm not gunna waste my time. But frankly this is a stupid, pointless, fluffy, soapbox argument.

People are stupid. Deal with it.

People make stupid decisions everyday in driving, TV, what we eat. The internet is no different!

While I agree wholeheartedly with your post, I feel the need to mention that, as a project manager, I use phrases such as "idiot-proof" now and then and I have a particularly easy to confuse user in mind: myself!
I've never been good with UIs, so, yes, I'll admit: there are people who are "dumb" in that sense, and believe me it is quite frustrating to be confused by what seems moderately usable by most.
I believe that, because of this "infirmity", I tend to come up with "user-friendly" designs that the most "idiotic" users can survive: if I can, they can!

Stupidity keeps the economy going.

I would assume my users were lazy before I'd assume they were stupid. That's why I build a step by step system for, let's say, configuring a web backend. I'm not assuming my "users" are stupid, but I do assume they don't want to spend hours learning what very technical terms or phrases mean, or configuring the software by hand - and if they're purchasing my product, they shouldn't have to.

So basically - Stupid = no, lazy = yes. I'm lazy when I'm using software, and I expect my users to put in the same amount of effort I would.

As a developer myself, and as someone who has been designing consumer-oriented software for over a decade, I'm slightly offended by your opinion piece. Blanket generalizations make for weak arguments. Setting my personal feelings aside, however...

Good design with regard to usability takes an incredible amount of time, money, and effort. It takes a thorough knowledge of--and constant communication with--your customers (my preference over 'users'). It also takes a humility to understand that you, the designer, are not a typical customer, and you must make an effort to step outside your comfort zone to see your design through their eyes. Products and sites that hit the mark have taken a great deal of care to grind and grind and grind the experience until it shines like a mirror. (Props to Newsvine on this front, by the way).

That said, I can say from experience that, despite all of that, it is incredibly frustrating to receive an email simply saying "I CAN'T LOG IN." Forget the fancy features. Forget the bells and whistles. I find that about 5% of our customers (more or less, depending on the type of site we've built) have profound trouble with the fundamental metaphors which we take for granted. Things as basic and ubiquitous as logins, password management, and basic navigation continually trip some people up. There are days when you just want to pull out your hair when you realize that someone just burned an hour of your time chasing a phantom bug in your design only to realize that they had CAPS LOCK on the whole time.

My personal belief that the mantra that 'users are stupid' is born from this frustration. Nothing more.

The older i get the less i want to sit and figure out fancy flash sites.... oh i have to click on this bullet to get in.. people are stupid and lazy and most likely their password is either password or the cute letmein

I don't create a design with "idiots" in mind. I just try to create a simple design that doesn't require problem solving skills to navigate. That said I do get a lot of "stupid" calls from shoppers, but thats the breaks with internet retail. Good Article Mate.

I am not a developer but I am the local geek that my friends call when they can't figure something out. I have given answers ranging from 'plug it in', 'refresh the page' or even 'did you finish reading the instructions' to 'gosh, that really is a bit more complicated than it needs to be - let me walk you through it'.

It's true that what is intuitive to me may not even be in the awareness of another person. Howver, what really bothers me is that some software companies seem to believe it profitable to keep their customers in a state of ignorance. This may not happen as much on the internet but I see it over and over again in the operating system everyone loves to hate. In my opinion 'wizards' simply add another layer of crap between the user and her understanding of what is happening. They keep us stupid by not trusting us to understand simple concepts.

Finally, I think that when it comes to internet use, we have reached a point where there should be some minimum expectation of comprehension. It is time for people to know the difference between their browser and the internet (thank-you aol), that they don't need to remember the entire string of letters for a website (ie: you can find that at h-t-t-p-colon-those slashy thingies-w-w-w-dot-see-en-en-dot-com) or that you can delete all of the preloaded advertisorial bookmarks -- for starters anyway. People should also know about the social dimension of the internet including the behavioral norms that are being established (don't type in all caps, no flame bait). These places are not simply the realm of geeks anymore but as the general public arrives in ever increasing numbers, they could stand to learn a bit about how to participate.

Anyway, I am not sure if I am being clear. My response to this article is that yes, a lot of people are stupid about their computers but unless we raise our expectations we can only expect them to stay that way. I don't think that web-developers are malicious, only frustrated.

/advocating for a higher standard!

i think the author doesn't know the difference between something that is stupid, and something that is easy to use. reading this article, one could make the case that the UI for the iPod is for stupid people because it doesn't have the ten thousand different buttons and "features" that other MP3 players have.

To me it seems to be the people who are running Windows 98 and if asked have no clue what a cookie is.

The majority are idiots, hands down, but it's pretty easy to tell who the idiots are.

Web developers are concerned about the usability of their applications and following user interface conventions that our customers have been conditioned to use is a common approach. Web developers aren't @!$%#s, they're just trying to design an intuitive interface that everyone can use.

I disagree because frankly it is the user most of the time. Of course sometimes as a web developer and especially for programming, you build something which makes total sense to you but you find out it doesn't make too much sense for others.

But a lot of time it is just small stuff that gets annoying. For example with my CMS on the website there is a support area, commen sense would tell you to first search in the forums and look through the support area but instead they just ask away without looking. Also on the frontpage it says it is a free script as well as a hundred other areas (including a download link...) yet they ask if it costs or not.

Just very frusrtating at times and I think you do have to make web stuff, at times, overly simple just to ensure that people do not get confused. Trying to make something usable for any type of users is incredibly tough as well, so far I haven't been able to do that super well.

It's not that users are stupid, it's just that many are computer illiterate. For example, many do not understand:

• How to highlight text with the mouse
• How to copy to and paste from the clipboard
• How to manually open a new browser window
• The difference between the browser's address and search fields

These are just a few examples. The problem doesn't just lie with web developers, but in the entire IT industry. If the entire user interface is flawed to begin with, the user is at a disadvantage before even opening the browser.

Those of us who work in the industry take certain skills for granted -- just like an author is taught to assume the reader knows nothing about a given topic when writing, we in the web design industry should assume our users are not computer geeks. So, to a certain extent, we must design to the lowest common denominator so as to leave as few users behind as possible.

So, I think this is an important topic that deserves continued attention and discussion. That being said, however, my objection to this piece is that the tone seems deliberately provocative -- the main purpose here seems to be "Let's p*ss everyone off and get everyone arguing (and generate page views)." Had this piece been written in a more positive tone, I think it would have been more constructive and conducive to a frank exchange of ideas and opinions.

Just my .02.

I almost got up and clapped. Great post.

and 4 days later...... they are still idiots :-D

I adhere to the KISS principle.

I think the problem with this article, is you possibly wrote your title first. Your title is the lead in for the first paragraph and as such presents a hard to defend argument. The truth is, while there maybe a number of web developers who do think their client's users are stupid; there is also a large number who don't. It's just not a well defendable position. For every time you say the unknown mass of web developers you work with call "users" stupid or idiotic; I can point to web site after website of leaders in the industry that state differently.

I can change the focus of your article, by making a simple title change to—The Myth of the Stupid User: Why Simplicity Doesn't Work. With the change in focus, you could easily prove your two primary premises: (1) Users aren't stupid; and (2) Web development isn't simply about simplicity.

I'm a web user, and I do something stupid at least a few times a week. I'm fine is some random web developer calls me stupid. Maybe I was, or maybe their design was impossible to navigate. Some designs require that you have insights into the developers mind, and its not a pretty place to be.

I'm a web developer and I'll say most of my site designs have at least one point/place where I fail the user. It's typically caused by my not knowing the user well enough. I've stopped trusting that my client knows their users. They rarely do, and getting insight about what the user wants from them is almost pointless. It's of course, good to know what the client wants for their users to experience; it just rarely meshes with what the individual wants from their user experience. I do my own research, I do my own studies, and combine that with my own perspectives as a potential user; and use that as a starting point. But I trust, that their will always be someone that I fail, my goal is to make it as few as possible, and to make the failures forgivable.

Web design is a complicated business. You have to learn and maintain a wealth of knowledge on a every growing list of skills: HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, PHP, ASP, .NET, Javascript, MySQL, Postgres, sIFR, AJAX, and the list keeps growing. But on top of that you have to weather your clients moods and idiosyncrasies—which may or may not include consider their customers/users stupid; to understanding psychology, interface design, and a host of other influences.

People are amazing, because we differ from each other in such minute ways. There's no need, yet, for a rallying cry of web users to mob designers everywhere, requesting that they do better. But there is a need for developers to grow more knowledgeable about the audience they are developing for; as well as users to grow more knowledgeable about using the services they request/want.

A mixture of the points you did make, specifically in your comment #17; can frequently be attributed back to the client, not the developer. I can't say when the last time I've heard a "real" developer state that opening new windows for links was a good idea. Let's face it most of us designers are web users as well, and we know the stuff we hate.

Besides, some of my more significant design failures have been caused by giving a client or website user simply what they requested.