I’m a smart person. I’ve been using the Internet since the early 1990s. I know how to program. I only feel the need to point this out, because I’m about to share with you a story in which I come across as a complete, blithering idiot, and I’m feeling a little defensive about it.
I got an email from an event that I won’t name, but I’m guessing a few of you are getting emails of your own. If you didn’t make the same mistake, then bask in the glory of being better at computers than I am. If you did make the same mistake, welcome to the club. You’re not alone.
The email I received was several paragraphs long and told me all the places and times where I could pick up my badge for the event. It also said that they were introducing something new this year called a QuickCode. The email instructed me to bring my photo id and my QuickCode to pick up my badge.
Then it had the following line:
Laura Klein’s QuickCode:
That’s it. After that, it went on to give me more badge-related information. “Aha, I thought. The automated system has failed to print my QuickCode.”
I immediately wrote back and said that I didn’t get my QuickCode. To the credit of the organization, I was immediately written back to by a very polite person who explained that the QuickCode was an image and even gave me instructions on how to turn on images in my email, in case I didn’t know how.
I was, as you might imagine, embarrassed. I mean, of course I know how to show images in an email. I just want to make that clear, because I’m coming off as enough of an idiot without you thinking I can’t use Gmail.
What I didn’t know was that the QuickCode was an image. Because I’ve never seen a QuickCode. Because a QuickCode wasn’t a thing to me until an hour ago. Because a QuickCode is just a name that somebody made up for a bar code that they’re using to help with their badging system.
Obviously the people writing the email knew what a QuickCode was, so it wasn’t at all surprising to them that you’d have to turn on images to see one. For those of us (ok, me) who had never heard of a QuickCode, this wasn’t immediately obvious. A QuickCode could just as easily have been a string of numbers and letters that could have been printed in the email. Of course, when I went back and re-read the email, the first paragraph did mention “scanning” the quick code, so I might have figured out what it was, but there were a lot of paragraphs in the email that I quickly skimmed. This is not unusual user behavior.
The interesting thing is that they could have avoided my acting like an idiot and subsequently having to deal with my support email by just including the phrase, “If you don’t see your QuickCode, try turning on images in your email.” They could have made that the alt text for the image so only people who didn’t have images turned on would see it.
Why am I telling you all this? I’m telling you this because we make assumptions of this sort in our interfaces every day. We assume people know that a QuickCode is an image, even though they’ve never heard of a QuickCode. We assume people know what our products do, even though they’ve never heard of our product. We assume people know where to go within our products to find the things they’re looking for, even though they weren’t in the meeting where we determined our product structure.
We are almost always wrong.
The moral of this story is not (just) that your users are going to do stupid things sometimes. It’s not even that they’re probably only going to skim our very long emails. The moral is that we constantly need to be asking ourselves what we really expect a user to understand about our product, and we need to have ways to preemptively help them in places where we’re presenting new concepts or unfamiliar terminology.
Users don’t know our slang. They don’t know our jargon. They don’t know our product. If we want them to use our products successfully, we need to teach them what they need to know without making them feel like idiots.