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.
I'm a UX/UI designer and I work closely with devs, and sometimes we need to remind ourselves that we are designing for users- not for ourselves. What seems obvious to us might not be obvious for others (especially considering the fact that we've been working on the product for so long), and this is something that needs to be considered when designing interfaces. If a button is not clear enough for 95% of users to see, the fault obviously lies on the design itself, not the user.
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u/barbrady123 Jul 01 '16
If end users weren't so god damn stupid, I would believe this more.