Even though our computers are now better than 15 years ago, they still malfunction 11%–20% of the time, a new study from the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University concludes. The researchers behind the study therefore find that there are major gains to be achieved for society by rethinking...
"A number of the participants in the survey were IT professionals, while most of the other participants were highly competent IT and computer users. Nevertheless, they encountered these problems, and it turns out that this involves some fundamental functions,"
As someone that works in IT the amount of people I’ve come across that have little to no technical ability to be in that field is staggering. It had a high paycheck so they showed up. Doesn’t make them competent computer users.
Lemmy pointed me to another study a bit ago. It was ~216K people ages 16-65 and multiple countries.
One of the easy tasks was to use the reply-all feature for an email program to send a response to three people
According to that study this is where 43% of the participants skills ended(or didn’t even reach cause I stuck level 0 and 1 together).
This was the most depressing part…
The numbers for the 4 skill levels don’t sum to 100% because a large proportion of the respondents never attempted the tasks, being unable to use computers.
So my above 43% is really 69% of users. That’s where their abilities taper off.
HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn't build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s' UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don't evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.
A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that's very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader's or lift's control panel doesn't change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!
You just don't make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can't and they shouldn't.
The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can't throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don't want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you'll just get very nervous.
Oddly enough we actually do user acceptance testing and conduct interviews. Most people fall into two categories. Ones that are willing to follow along and see where things go and usually it gets them where they want to go. The other group won’t interact with anything for more than a second because they have one hyper focused goal in mind. Anything that they can’t tell is explicitly related to that goal and they bounce. Like what you want is literally step two. We just need some info first in step 1 to display the right stuff for step 2. Explaining this during step one doesn’t appear to help either.
In your example it’s like expecting the truck to get loaded without ever going to the lift. They just want to skip to the end. They can’t be bothered with the process at all.