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How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog (anniemueller.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 80 points 11 months ago (4 children)

At least once in their life, every tech person should be forced to teach someone like my mum how to use a piece of technology.

That will very quickly change your perspective on what counts as user friendly.

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  • [–] 71 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Pretty sure every tech person at some point or another has had to do exactly that. And not just their mom, but their dad, and their extended family, and their parent’s friends who have a random problem, etc

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    And why? Because none of them can read the fucking manual! And you'll say they don't try, but many of them have tried. Once. And all they learned was that it wouldn't do them any good.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Because the manual often doesn't cover what they're trying to do, or finding reliable information online is it's own struggle.

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I taught basic computer literacy. I am a software developer. It's tough to reframe my own knowledge so drastically, but the new perspective also makes me question why so many things are wrong with current tech (particularly UI/UX).

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Oh definitely, there's so many products we use that are far more complicated than they have any need to be.

    Vehicles and appliances are two examples that come to mind.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    My peeve is products made "easy" to use, in a way that makes explaining them extremely difficult. Two top examples are:

    URL bar in browsers which doubles as a search bar. Good luck explaining why if you type in an exact existing address, you will get there, but otherwise (typo, extra space), you will end up on Google.

    Apple's iMessage. Your message will be sent to your contact using one of three protocols: SMS/MMS, iMessage or RCS. This is almost entirely opaque, and I even had to explain to a tech-savvy person why videos they send me look like blobs.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    I think the issue is that you need to understand who your users actually are. Documentation for a library intended to be used by a reasonably competent software engineer is going to have different requirements vs documentation for a cli utility aimed at Arch btw Linux users vs documentation for a program to help Grandma organize family photos.

    If you throw a terminal command at Grandma she's going to panic and call her grandchild. If you put instructions for extracting a tarball in your library docs the programmer is going to get bored and skip ahead.

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