this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it well enough

feynman has a nice philosophy on this that I think is true & useful: (that there's great variety in capability of the average person, we should explain things faithfully & without dumbing it down):

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@omarshehata/1123783593602927...

The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.

Counterpoint, when a random dialog asks for a password, the answer is not always "give the password", so maybe that's part of the reason why people find it so confusing.

When you can't open Outlook because you're getting an error, ya might need to fuckin sign in. This is sadly a common occurrence.

If those users aren't reading the error dialogs anyways, why do the error dialogs need to pander to those users? I wonder if the "make it dumb enough for every user to understand" approach leads to user comprehension plateauing prematurely.

Shareholder-driven growth targets mean it's no longer good enough to target the 20th percentile users, who might have reading comprehension at a 5th grade level. You have to hit the 10th percentile, or the 5th. Be glad that you still get text instead of pictures.

Tangentially related, I used to work at a company where the C level was demanding all of our help documents be videos. They couldn't understand that it made them unsearchable, took way more time, did not allow branching or decision making in the processes, if anything in the workflow or even UI changed the entire thing would need to be redone, takes up a ton of space, is not easily skimmable etc. "but it's easier than reading!" "are you telling me you've never learned how to do things on YouTube?" Etc. I refused and resigned not long after.

I was thinking you could do product demos / help videos combined as an acceptance test suite.

You would programmatically build the self help tutorial like a ui test (use a test browser and it would be like cypress/selenium). You would write a script, (ai) text to speech, and you could even respond to user input for branching.

These would be, de facto, your acceptance test suite and your tutorials will flag when they break on new ui developments, helping to keep them up to date

Sure, if they want to hire someone. Ain't nobody got time for that.

> Be glad that you still get text instead of pictures.

Even that isn’t a given. I’ve seen banks using emoji in their notifications. Companies are using ML to predict which emoji to change your text to. There are emoji domain names. Etcetera.

Half the people in my class in college don't know what Windows is. As in, they know they use a laptop. They don't know they are using Windows.

> but they can learn.

though do they want to?

If they can learn, they would've. And then cease being a non-technical user.

I usually learn things without the explicit desire to learn, and then feel happy that I did learn. Perhaps I should learn more.

> And then cease being a non-technical user

I'm glad you said this because Feynman has a beautiful response to it: basically, there is no such thing as a "non-technical user". Almost everyone is adept at navigating _some_ complex system in their life. I agree with you that they probably don't want to learn.

but the reason they don't want to learn is because they don't think there is any value on it, they believe it is a waste of time. For the same reason I (used to) believe it's a waste of time for me to play puzzle games (I'm bad at it, I don't enjoy it, what's the point). Or learn to manage people, or learn to understand politics, etc.

I'm asking you (and everyone reading this) to suspend disbelief and pretend that these users DO have capacity to learn, and they just don't see any value in it, and it's on us to clearly (and concisely) communicate the value without gatekeeping and without dumbing it down. I have been surprised at how people's capacity to learn was much greater than I expected, and I hope the same will be true for you.

I see this attitude a lot of, "well, if you want to understand how this system works, we have to start from scratch" (and they start to lecture for hours about some fundamental things). I think this is a failure mode: an inability to figure out _what_ fundamental pieces actually matter to understanding the current system.

Apologies for the rant, I feel strongly about this because I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit here that everyone can benefit from, but I'm still trying to refine my thoughts.

i tried to write about this here: https://omarshehata.substack.com/p/my-favorite-1980s-canadia...

A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".

Not an issue, replace server with the cloud and remove cache, temporary is fine

Yeah you can't use words like that. Even many people who won't panic at the word "server" don't really understand what it is.

"This message no longer exists in your Inbox. If you close it, you will not be able to open it again."

What's more amazing is that this state actually happens often enough in Outlook that somebody wrote code to detect it, and to create a message box for the user to warn them about it.

every warning or labelling of an issue is because it happened to somebody, and it needed to be prevented.

It's true in the physical world - signs like 'beware of falling pottery' for example. The electronic world is a facsimile of the real world!

"locally", "the cloud"

Is it local if I stay in the same ZIP code?

Even that can still be too far. I lean towards “your computer” and “their computer”

So what? Most users will understand this or at least get the gist. My mum can ask me what it means and then I can tell her. That's a much better outcome than the original message.

Wrong.

This is stupid, and you are stupid to entertain this idiotic notion.

Let's take another example:

"The mobility device can no longer operate. Your destination is no longer available."

This tells me absolutely nothing. It possibly even implies that something very bad has happened to my destination!

"The bus engine has broken down. Your route destination is no longer in service."

Even to someone who doesn't know what a "bus", "engine", or a "route" are, this is an actionable and clear message. If I don't know what those things are, I can quickly figure out what a bus, engine and route are, or pass the message to someone who does understand.

Removing information and replacing it with nonsense does not make an error message better. You don't need to be technical to be able to make sense of a message.

How about a dialog with the buttons "Try again", "Save to file...", "Copy to clipboard" and "Discard contents"?

I'd say a non-tech user has no idea what a server or cache is. I'd go with the word "backup" instead. Something like telling them that email is not backed up (online? where?) and if they delete it from their computer it won't be able to be recovered.

Yeah but that would be taking nearly all of the Microsoft out of it ...

Funny of you to think your non-technical uncle is aware that there is such a thing as "mail server". All they know is that this email thing works, in the sense that he can send and receive emails.

Does anyone have any real studies about whether users will "have their heads explode" when presented with technical language? Apple and Microsoft did user studies for this sort of thing in the 80s and 90s, right? Has anyone done similar in the 00s, 10s, and 20s?

Do we really need to? I'd lay odds that the effect remains the same: users dismiss the error/warning without reading it.

There are only two acceptable solutions to this problem:

1. No error message. Just recover the cached message.

2. The message is deleted

There’s a world we live in where ahem-ahem a certain design focused company would’ve done it this way.

Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the Mail app to make a decision on whether to recover the cached message or not. It’s those engineers & designers who built that damn cache in the first place. And the server too.

Let _them_ deal with the consequences of messages existing in one but not the other. It’s not the user’s job to care.