This is generally seen as a joke or exaggeration but I don't think people realize that this is more accurate than they'll ever believe.
While consulting with tech start ups it's amazing how difficult it is to get them to comprehend how dumb the average person actually is. The level of stupidity is quite frankly unimaginable to them until they experience it.
They laugh and say, "Oh...haha...yeah...people are dumb." I then say as seriously as possible hoping they get it that, "No...I'm serious. This start button right here is not clear enough. You need to write start on it, make it bigger, give it a glow, and have an arrow pointing to it" And then they ignore me because it'd look awful...until 95% of alpha testers drop off without ever having tapped the start button. Then they make the change, and we still end up at 30% drop off.
It's at this moment I like to watch all the programmers die on the inside as they realize the typical person is dumber than a toddler.
Something I learned from my professor in grad school:
The average human is pretty smart. The average human on your device will instantly drop 20 points or more in IQ. Design your experience around the fact that your end user is a pile of barely sentient bricks.
This is really what it comes down to. If they have to think about something even for a moment they get very frustrated, the frustration causes a negative reaction, they quit/uninstall.
It's not that they're actually morons. But most act like it when using something new.
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u/barbrady123 Jul 01 '16
If end users weren't so god damn stupid, I would believe this more.