Every now and then these stories pop up in the media. Some figure of authority explains a negative situation, and that the reason for this situation is a flaw in people’s character: they are portrayed as stupid, lazy or handed some other form of negative description, and are the ones at fault.

Here Bobby Laurie is criticising people’s ability to listen.

When this critique is combined with a description of how the correct behaviour was handed to the user in form of a text, written or oral, an alarm should go off: maybe it’s a usability problem, and not a user error. Text is often added when usability is not good enough. The longer the text on what you have to do to get a tool working, the less usable it often is.

So, in the example Bobby Laurie is writing about, it’s the message “Put the mask over your mouth and nose” that is the text. But if you’re on a plane, and you hear a loud, sharp noise, while a broken window sucks out all the air, when the oxygen mask then drops down from above, you don’t think about what the flight attendant actually said. You put the mask on. And yes, we can smile at the person actually remembering to take a selfie.

But look at the picture below. Which mask would you automatically put over both mouth and nose?

Maybe Bobby Laurie and all the journalists should ask South West Air why their masks aren’t all that usable in a panic situation? Which is, indeed, the situation they are intended for.

But Bobby Laurie won’t do that. He is sticking with the ‘people are idiots’ scenario.

Any journalists that want to have another go at this story? And if you work with Interaction Design, or some other form of usability or application development and are mad at the users for not following instructions, take a closer look at your application. You just struck gold. Fix it and make your users a lot more successful at using your app.

Also, I’ve gotten some comments that users can be idiots. Yes they can, but they are still your users, so treat them well 😉

Other blog posts

A little shameless self promotion, maybe you can learn something, or teach me something I missed, when writing? Stuff I’ve worked on and think I have figure out at some level.

Usability testing

User interviews

Drawing to communicate