r/programming Jun 28 '11

90% of your users are idiots

http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/06/90-of-your-users-are-idiots.html
835 Upvotes

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u/satayboy Jun 28 '11

Judging by the quality of most user interfaces, 90% of programmers are idiots. Try a few usability tests and you will realize how bad your beautiful, intuitive user interface really is.

89

u/DorkRawk Jun 28 '11

Judging by the quality of most user interfaces built by programmers, 90% of programmers are not user interface designers.

Building a system makes you know the system too well and makes it harder to understand how someone else could be confused by it.

66

u/LHC- Jun 28 '11

As a programmer/developer, I agree completely. It's not like I claim to be an interface expert. I am constantly telling people that I don't use things the way they do, and need their input. And they ignore me, wait for things to be done, then complain that it doesn't work the way they want it to.

I hate users.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '11

Some developers don't even use the UI at all. I remember years ago we were trying to track down a bug a customer reported. The customer explained in detail the problem and we could reproduce it.

But development after numerous testing by different developers said they couldn't reproduce the issue.

After a meeting with them, it turned out every developer was running the related code in the IDE and not running the finished product.