Say that, unbeknownst to you, 90% of your users are non-native English speakers. Is a non-native English speaker "stupid" because they misinterpret the simple English idioms, metaphors, and symbology sprinkled throughout your product?
A group of actually-stupid-but-native English speakers might exhibit the same behavior.
You hypothesize that you have a large percentage of non-native English speakers using your app and change the design to accomodate. Behavior improves, distinguishing the bulk of your users from merely "stupid" English speakers.
The problem is that if you conceptualize your users as "stupid" the hypothesis that something else might be going on _never even enters your head_. You never do the experiment. Or, if you do, it's not faithful to an alternative model and is basically a wild stab in the dark.
Imagine your user was not able to sleep on a Trans-Pacific flight in bad weather, they have hay fever and a very sore neck.
Better yet, get user studies.
No.
An idiot giving you 100% will never learn your product.
A genius giving you 1% will eventually develop a highly optimized way to use your product.
If we assume all users are the former, we never design for the latter. That pretty much sums up the last 20 years of de facto UX.
And if you disagree, I'd recommend you go find a call center still using mainframe apps, and watch a random sample of 100 users.
It was hilarious watching some of the reactions in our team when a client gave us a screenshot that was just boxes with numbers in them arranged neatly with no more than red/yellow/green for colors. Some saw ugly... I saw enhanced productivity.
Personally I think more UI/UX designers need to spend time doing data entry with time constraints so they learn the pains of repeated useless actions and time wasting features.
perhaps, if the user is a continual user. but most users of most products are infrequent, and if your UI relies on being learned over time, it's probably not going to work for most people.
If you're working on SaaS that is meant to help someone make money or work faster, there's a good chance you'll have people using your software as a part of their dayjob - i.e. 2-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. If you treat your users as idiots and don't implement space for them to grow (i.e. power user features), you'll be wasting a lot of life for a lot of people (and a lot of money of their bosses).
That's a heuristic I'd like to see being used in UX design: assume your software becomes a tool in some company, and you have full-time users spending their workday on it. Design to that group.
Which, yes, probably. But there are more goals in software development than hyper growth.
In most situations most of the time, your code is between someone and something they want. Your main importance in their life is when you fuck it up, not when you get it right. You just aren’t that important. The user is.
Which is partly why we need books championing good design. Because good design gets out of the way, and would go mostly unnoticed if not for other designers and aficionados giving them kudos.
I disagree that you have to make the same decisions. I think you need to design your product contextually. Sometimes, users might be giving you 100% of their capacity, sometimes they will only give you 1%. It depends on context and motivation. I'm working on a personal finance app. Sometimes, users are in a "I just want to make sure that latest transaction isn't fraud"-mode and you'll have seconds of attention. But sometimes (albeit much more rarely), users are in a "I want to sit down and think about my financial future mode".
> "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing...
I hope not, but unfortunately, I've often found that it is.
At least in my experience, the two ways of framing users lead to different behavior of development team.
but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person.
You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.