Send multiple all user emails stating which end to put in the water. People still call the Help Desk or email you directly, your response is forwarding them the email, they complained that it’s not convenient or they get too many emails or don’t have time for emails.
You send documentation and place it on the portal. they complain it’s overly complicated, so you add screenshots with which end to put in the water. They still mess it up and complain about lack of instruction.
You schedule 30 minute courses, 3 times a day, every day of the week and spam out notifications to sign up. You get a total of 12 people the first 2 weeks, most of which figured it out on their own at some point but thought it was mandatory, or that there were high level secrets or Tips n Tricks you were gonna teach. When the education period ends, you still get people complaining that the times weren’t convenient enough for them because they work 2nd shift or weekends.
You schedule another 2 weeks of classes, after hours and on weekends. 2 people show up, but not the ones who bitched about it.
Despite everything, your boss still sings you on your review didn’t meet the needs of the organization with this rollout
Oof, I’m not in IT thank goodness, but I still feel this in my bones. I’ve had to write plenty of instructions for in-house trained users though, and it seemed just as bad. I can’t imagine what it’s like with real randos.
I’ve definitely seen some of these “please let us help you” getting sent around. And even in completely different types of organizations I’ve seen time and time again how the obnoxious entitled complainers don’t even show up.
They’re just serial complainers. Even if you walk around their department with a laptop to give them 5 minute instruction, no matter when you do it it’s always inconvenient to them. Some people exist solely to complain about shit
Yeah, unfortunately a huge chunk of the population is so negative that complaining about the world is pretty much how they interact with it. That and they define themselves by the things they don’t like.
Documentation be like:
For (literal string) place for i = T end of and rest unit 4
I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.
I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.
My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on
Scripting.Dictionarywhich is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.
If you hear about it that much, why not make the script check for .NET before crashing?
It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.
Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.
90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.
What’s this from?
gravity falls
if ( parameters.teaMass <= TEA_BAG_WEIGHT ) { return "Error: incorrect input. Check if tea bag was inserted correctly into water container." }And then a users starts adding weights to the label until it passes.
Hmm … Better pigeon hole clients into only using the teabag.
“Why can’t I put the label in the water?!”
Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.
I write graphics software that almost seems intuitive, until you realize I gave it a split personality.
Even I forget about the split personality side of it.
Smart developer: let’s make the label an 8 inch square so it won’t fit in any mug.
User: Folds square in half to fit into mug.
End user: makes tea in a large pot, to fit the label.
Developer: THATS IT WE’RE A BROWSER BASED APP NOW!
End user: why can’t I run this on my AOL account?
Huge waste of material on the label.
Since the labels are larger, the boxes for those tea bags will need to be larger too. That incurs in additional waste of material and storage space.
People working in markets selling those tea bags will complain. Now their boxes don’t fit in the aisle alongside boxes with tea bags of other brands.
Customers will find it clunky and convoluted. Some will understand why the dev did it, and get angry - because from their PoV it’ll sound like the dev is saying “I assume that you’re a muppet, unable to distinguish the label from the bag”.
And some will still do like others said: use a larger pot, fold the label, etc. Defeating the purpose of the change.
There are plenty situations where you can be smart. This is not one of them, stick to standards and document it properly. “This is the bag, it goes in. This is the label, it goes out.”
(Not that it changes much for me. I’m still ripping the tea bag apart and mixing the contents with my yerba mate. Unexpected use case!)
tea_bag.unwrap()
Just get rid of the label altogether. I’m always suspicious when a teabag has a string on it.
You aren’t supposed to leave it in the water the whole time.
A proper engineer would make the tag absorbent and use the principle of capillarity to transfer the water to the bag (and the other way round once tea flavoured) to cover this case.
Users can’t avoid being stupid, but a proper engineer should be able to cover all cases.
So you’re saying it should wick the water from the cup to the table like an oil lantern. That seems like a good way to have half of your cup on the table.😂
If you get it to travel up the string, gravity will definitely do the rest. It seems like such a passive aggressive way to design a product and I’m all for it.
Or the pg tips approach: ‘d’ya know what? No more tag or thread for ya now you’ve got to fish and pinch the baggy out of your scolding tea ya wanker’.
This assumes an infinite timeline and budget.
And also the existence of a perfectly insulative, yet durable and long-lasting sheath for the bag. I realise it’s just an analogy, and in cyberspace that sort of thing is trivial, with real matter it’s beyond a pipe dream.
Well, no proper engineer will agree to less than that
No, that complicates things way too much. Simplicity in design is beauty. A real engineer would recognize the tag on the string not only as a point a confusion, but also a superfluous feature. Simply remove it. The end user will have to use a spoon supplied by themselves to remove the teabag, but thats their problem. At least there is actually tea in the cup at that point.
Loose leaf tea is peak design.
I disagree. The teabag is a welcome replacement to having to have yet another unitasker in the kitchen.
“I’ll add this to our knowledge base and other people can assist now!”
“Hey So-and-so, it looks like you our are guru at this issue, can you take a look at these 4 users who mentioned the software in their ticket?”
I just need to make progress on my projects, stop giving me desktop tickets pls :)
Ans that’s how an iPhone with an interface that even a toddler can figure out sold a few billion devices.
At what cost, though? I thought the generations after the millennials would be more tech-literate. But after seeing Gen Zs around me at home and at work, things are just regressing.
It was inevitable. We took a mishmash of things that kinda worked together with a patchwork of software and shoved it into a streamlined define with a custom made interface to tie it all together. One of those things pushes the user to learn more, and it’s not the finished and polished product.
Can’t really blame them either, it was our generation that dropped the ball in making sure they were more tech literate than us. Not that I have kids but still.
The modern electronic devices are far more railroaded than it was back in the day tho.
Want to download an application? There’s the App Store. No need to download random .exes from sketchy websites (and learn what a “computer virus” is the hard way)
Downloaded a picture? It’s instantly inside your gallery. Back then we needed to find a folder called “Download” or “My Documents” using something called the Explorer!
iPhone and Android made a lot of things dumber and easier to take in, but I feel like it had a detrimental effect on digital literacy.
A little. Hands on parenting is what they need. I made sure my baby brother is tech literate when my mom is 100 percent not. He just graduated highschool this year. Sure some of the blame is on tech but kids don’t know how to shit in a toilet either and parents make damn sure they learn as quickly as possible.
Nah, our generation had to tinker with shit to get it working. Kids these days have it easy, which is good from a user perspective, but fails to train them how any of it actually works at a deeper level.
No one has to install a device driver anymore.
See my other comment.
Tldr: Parents make sure to teach their kids not to shit on the ground.
As someone who’s used and uses both for work and isn’t a fanboy of either, sorry but apple does not have an easy to learn interface. It seems like every single choice they made was done to just be different from the alternative, more often than not to the detriment of the user. If they lock people in to how their ecosystem works low tech people can’t easily change.
If they lock people in to how their ecosystem works low tech people can’t easily change.
Other people can just mimic the iPhone interface. That’s basically what Android did.
The real difficulty of switching to another device from Apple is the multi-year contract that the phone companies try to get you on.
Back in 2012 apple won a UI patent and we know how those megacorps do. No idea to what extent but that sorta stops any big contenders on copying them. The multi year contracts are a meme from the past but it’s the same sort of people who aren’t techliterate enough to learn a new UI, that keep with the contracts.
The multi year contracts are a meme from the past
I don’t know if I’d can cell phone contacts a meme.
Carrier lockdowns seem to be an US only thing now.
They sorta are, plenty of options for cheap quality untilited phone plans out there even with international included and very few people actually need a state of the art 1k phone to make payments on.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not policing how people should spend their money. All I’m saying is that plans are from the past and don’t need to exist, like faxes.
I’d* better write some documentation
Using better by itself is fine in an informal context, and “had better” is only required for formal contexts. And I don’t think a meme on the internet counts as a formal context.
And also, 🤓☝️
That’d be a contraction of ‘would’ in this case. As an ESL speaker I used to find these grammar ‘mistakes’ (for lack of a better word) made more difficult for me to parse the sentences. As with code ‘written once but read many times’ would apply here.
For a lot of English speakers, the “had” and “have” in contractions is completely omitted in certain contexts. It’s more prevalent in some dialects (I’m in the south US and it’s more common than not). Usually “had” is dropped more than “have”.
Also, English can drop the pronoun, article, and even copula for certain indicative statements. I think it’s specifically for observations, especially when the context is clear.
looking at someone’s bracelet “Cool bracelet.” [That’s a]
wakes up “sigh Gotta get up and go to work…” [I’ve]
“Ain’t no day for picking tomatoes like a Saturday.” [There]
“No war but class war!” [There’s]
“Forecast came in on the radio. Says there’s gonna be a hell of a lot of rain today.” [It said -> Says/Said]
“Can’t count the number of Brits I’ve killed. Guess I’m just allergic to beans on toast.” [I; I]
“House came tumblin’ down after the sinkhole opened up” [The]
for lack of a better word
Usages of non-standard grammar.
This one poses me (ETL) no problem, but my brain always tilts when the natives mix subject/verb contractions (you’re, it’s, they’re) with the possessives (your, its, their).
Yeah maybe not even non-standard as much as non-formal in this case.
I wanted to mean ‘different from what you learn in English class in school as a kid’ so non-formal, non -standard, dialectal, slang, misspellings, same-sounding words…
That’s all covered by “non-standard” - because the standard of a language dictates what’s to be taken as informal/vulgar/archaic, dialectal, slang, different words or the same word, etc. And while there are exceptions most of the time when people learn a non-native language they learn the standard, in detriment of other varieties.
(Sorry for nerding out about this, I just love this sort of topic.)
It would be a contraction of had: “I had better write…” Using would there doesn’t make sense. The function of had in the sentence is just to change the tense. Without had it’s something you should be doing now. With had, it’s something you should probably have already done.
More or less my point, languages are weird with lots of arbitrary idiomatic things—‘would rather’ but ‘had better’.
After posting the comment I’ve thought ‘wait, it makes more sense for it to be should’ so my guesses are a bit off today.
I can be an idiot every once and a blue moon. Thank you to anyone who put literally everything a manual just in case someone is braindead and isn’t afraid to rtfm.
To be honest it’s just after I’ve spent 10 hours on something fairly complicated and new to me. I suddenly can’t think for myself anymore. It literally becomes a chore to do the simplest shit sometimes.
Honestly, if you read the manual you are very much not dumb
I do appreciate it, I know I’m no idiot.
To be honest, I kinda wish some projects came with API manuals. I understand it’s not a priority in an open source project with limited resources.
It would be nice to use a python based ml tool without passing commands through it via shell. People do it, I just don’t have the time or experience to analyze a complex project like ML voice synthesis.
I design optics and I’ve seen a return request because they “couldn’t see the target” and included photos to show what they meant. The customer installed it backwards and didn’t bother trying the other way.
If it can be mounted both ways it should work both ways. 🤷♂️
Idiot proofing just results in a better class of idiot.
