Re: Note Section - Design Principles

> I also worry that the "Characteristics of the Average User" as  
> described below could lead us into the trap of modeling a user as  
> "dumb".  Our experience at Tellme has been that users are not dumb,  
> but systems are often notoriously bad at communicating, and they're  
> often especially bad if they treat the user at a kindergarten level.

I agree the way I worded the list paints the user in a pretty bad  
light. I was mostly trying to make brief points about the users, in a  
formal write-up the description might be a little gentler. However,  
the claims I made are based on the results of a few user studies.  
Some of the results are surprising, but they seem to the true for the  
majority.

I think the point you raise about some users being more advanced than  
this should be considered if we ever get into creating different  
categorizations of users based on our use cases. I think it's  
important that we try to make suggestions that are useful for people  
who fall into the category of the completely naive user, as well as  
the more intuitive/advanced user.

> - Users are unempowered to request that a site fix its security  
> problems and therefore are forced to decide whether to take the  
> risk in order to complete the task

I think this is a great point, important yet not always considered. I  
can think of a few examples where a user might go to a site and be  
faced with this decision. But I'm not sure how this would fit into  
our scope? Is there a way to offer alternatives for this?



- Maritza

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~maritzaj/

Received on Tuesday, 2 January 2007 17:46:36 UTC