If you run a startup or a company whose audience is early adapters you get a skewed view of the average level of competence of users.
I don't know if things get worse in other countries. However, I would guess that 10-20% of the US population lacks the basic literacy and logic skills to hold a manual job involving anything but repetitive tasks.
~13% when it comes to reading, ~20% when it comes to quantitative tasks.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piagets_theory_of_cognitive_dev...
> a pretty good view of what average competence looks like.
How interesting - I bet you could tell some good (and informative/scary) stories. I'd buy the book.
Due to the decentralized nature of education in the US, there is higher variation in outcomes. This likely leads to greater illiteracy in the US than in other industrialized countries.
Example: Jakob Nielsen publishes research that shows "people on the web don't read." The sample content used to determine this? The list of tourist attractions in North Dakota.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Finally, the vast majority of text on the web around forms etc. is useless, poorly written, obtuse, abstruse. People have been indirectly trained to ignore it. It's not surprising that most users ignore that messages you took the effort to write.
Example: Grandma sending pictures to Larry! Oh, he must be [email protected], right?
Should have taken that free trip to shengze or something :)
Derived from a well-known Passover technical school?
1. Use a handle that is a deliberate misspelling of an archaic name, and;
2. Use an archaic spelling of my surname as a vanity domain.
I have a <name>@<name>.net email. And every time I'm spelling my email to someone, I say: name, n a m e @name.net, 99 times out of 100 they ask me if the second "name" is spelled like the first one.
Not only has this taught me how incredibly oblivious some people are to how their email works, but it also showed me just how many companies out there are willing to sign up a random email for an account without verifying the email's ownership, including some big companies like PayPal.
If three other people tried that username, I not only got locked out of my BoA account, and had to set up a bunch of stuff again.
I have a long blog post about BoA's horrible policies I still haven't published because I work in a major financial city and might end up wanting to work for them some day, but as time goes by the odds of it getting published go way up.
It does make for fun responses... I was invited to a bachelor party in Las Vegas, which I sadly had to decline on account of being halfway around the world.
Those are not real flight itineraries.
They are usually well crafted spam sent to anyone and everyone, designed to entice personal details like bank accounts, pin numbers and visa card numbers from unexpecting users.
I understand that people make mistakes and typos happen. But when you're dealing with legal documents there's no excuse for this kind of oversight.
How does that work? Have you created some sort of filter? (How do you make sure that it gets the correct emails?)
On the flipside I sometimes get mails intended for someone else with my name in Australia, but that is easy enough to assume that his friends/kids' teachers/etc. just manually typed in the address and messed it up.
I respond saying the shop has the wrong email address. The shop owner (let's call him Bob) replies saying "that's the one you gave me" facepalm #1
I find the car owner and forward him the info on facebook. He responds back saying "Thanks, Bob." Even though the message is clearly from me. facepalm #2
Even if these people were completely tech illiterate... have they never heard of a wrong number?!?
He emailed back as if I were a student. I responded pointing out that I had no association with the school. He emailed back asking me to explain further, as there was someone with my name at the school. So I explained that I thought it was probably someone with the same name. At least that ended it.
Calling them either "Idiots" or "Dumb users" seems reasonable, so why not roll with it?
Would you call someone who can't drive a car an idiot? Or someone who is using an ATM machine for the first time? These people are not competent. They are inexperienced. But a pejorative term like "idiot" isn't called for.
If you can't apply the term "idiots" to these people then the word is useless and can never be used.
I would if this person was out on the highway. I learned to drive on a parking lot, and then on roads with very little traffic. People who can't drive are a danger to themselves. People who are too incompetent to know what their correct email address is are a danger to themselves too.
Sure, if they didn't even attempt to learn to drive before getting behind the wheel.
Or someone who is using an ATM machine for the first time?
Sure, if their failure to use even the most elementary mental faculties available to them affected anyone other than themselves.
Next time call the Internet Police on those fkers!!
You are fantastic, cheers.
There's Tata Docomo who sends me monthly postpaid bill. I've learened two things from their emails - that gentleman in Nagpur is very irresponsible in paying bills and that Tata Docomo's spam filters are so strong my email never made it them. They keep on sending. I guess they shall send me the calls records if I request to this email.
My fault? I've one of the most famous/common Indian/Hindi names on Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo and domain name too - both .in and .com.
Most such e-mail traffic is just spam, not sent by the banks, but sent by people hoping to trick the recipitent into reading the e-mail, following the link and logging into a false web page set up to act like the bank web site.
Once they have your logon details they will go to the real bank page and transfer out your money.
I don't click on most email links because you never know if it's the scammer or the company.
Of course. But it's a real bank statement and it's a real mobile bill that makes its way into my inbox each month. Used to, I mean before I created a filter to delete it as soon as it arrives.
i have a first.last@gmail address and my name is very common. So i bet others had to use less desirable gmail addresses.
Since google started to aggressively push for adding alternative email and/or phone number, dumb users that initially wanted my email address entered it as their "alternate email" not understanding it's for password recovery only.
I clicked the "not me" link in more than 20 confirmation emails, but google probably never used that to better inform the dumb users.
Now my gmail account is a cesspool of emails intended for other people, site registration confirmation for idiots with same first/last name but a different middle name... And there's no spam algorithm that can fight that!
Time to start looking for alternatives.