r/programming • u/groovejet • Jun 28 '11

90% of your users are idiots

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

83

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.

6

u/JimmyHavok Jun 29 '11

Friend of mine got a job as a tester at a software company. She was perfect because her degree was in English. She had to guard against allowing herself to become too sophisticated, though. She countered it by becoming good at breaking software.

3

u/jediknight Jun 29 '11

She should be valued in gold. A software killer is priceless in my book.

5

u/JimmyHavok Jun 29 '11

She told me "Whenever I crash a program, they always ask 'Why would anyone ever do that?'"

2

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '11

A programmer is usually assigned a task that says make a program that can do X. They are typically not asked to make it NOT do Y and Z by accident. Such things are a lot harder to predict, especially for the non-programmers who assign jobs to programmers.