In A Small Matter of Programming, Bonnie Nardi talks about how technologists - programmers, interface developers, researchers - tend to visualize users of software like this: They're not smart enough to figure out how to use software products, they're incapable of understanding their underlying structures and models, and they're unwilling to figure things out on their own. That is, users are lazy idiots.
I've seen users referred to like this, both implicitly and explicitly. I've even fallen into that way of thinking myself a bunch of times. In her book, Nardi goes on to refute this view; users are accountants, doctors, teachers, and other hard-working, intelligent people who do not need to be talked down to and insulted by their software. She then describes how interactive systems should be built for real users, and that's really what her book is about.
Last week I was in a day-long meeting to our funding organization. The speakers stood at a podium, some turning away from or walking away from the microphone, all talking over poorly designed Powerpoint presentations projected on the large screen at the front of the room. One speaker, a highly respected researcher in machine learning, showed a set of slides that was as ugly as the others, but not notably uglier. One slide showed a process diagram, pictures and arrows, in which a problem arises, a learning mechanism intervenes and either solves the problem or hands it to an expert, then the process flows on to the user.
On this slide each thing was signified by a chunk of clip art. The learning mechanism was a giant open book smiling down over a bunch of adoring people. The expert was illustrated as a white man in a shirt and tie. The user was shown as a cartoon portrait of a guy with a toothy smile so wide it distorted his face, hair that poked out in most directions, a scruffy beard, and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked like a moron on vacation.
The speaker noted that sometimes in these processes the expert is the end user, but in this case, with this diagram, the user is naive. That's why he used this silly picture, he said. Because, unless the user is an expert, he or she is stupid, functionally unable even to maintain minimal levels of hygiene.
I will reread the relevant sections of Nardi's book and try to commit parts of it to memory for the next time I see this kind of nonsense.
