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First off sorry if my tone has been a bit combative. I'm very passionate about this issue and I'll try to tone it down a bit. My observations come from experience in user interaction design involving actual user interviews and watching people interact with sites. You'd be surprised what happens. Really. People aren't logical. There's a lot of good literature on it too if you're interested.

1. I've already redesigned the website twice, and people still ask at the forum where they can download it.

I understand your frustration.

2. When I ask those people why they can't find it, they never give an answer! How am I supposed to know what they think when they don't even reply?

They probably never come back to the forum. Also, users aren't the best for diagnosing these kind of problems. Try asking someone why they lost their keys. There's not really a good answer to questions like that. These people are going elsewhere anyway.

3. I asked a lot of other people who *do* reply, but all of them think that the download link is easy to find, and think that the people who can't find the download link are idiots.

People are entitled to their opinions. You seem personally frustrated that these people don't find your download link, so I think you'd want to help them. If the software isn't designed for them, maybe you can make that more clear on your site by describing or showing it better. If it is, keep on trying, there's got to be a way. Otherwise, just live with it I guess.

4. The download link is on the left of the forum link! How is it even possible that one cannot see it?

Who knows? The mind works in mysterious ways that are often unintuitive. I haven't seen your design. Have you tried putting it on the right? Making it bigger? Putting links in multiple places? Putting whitespace around a link so it stands out? All I ask is that you consider other solutions than exclusively linking from within a larger list. I don't even know what your site is, so really I'm just trying to give you some free usability advice.

5. Even on the forum pages, there are all kinds of links that link back to the download page. When a user enters the forum, he's presented with a huge, orange box that tells the user where he can find the download page. This box is much larger than the "Continue to the forums" link.

Tweak it maybe. Does the orange make people skip over it because it's too bright and looks like an ad? Is there sufficient spacing around to make it stand out? You might look into eyetracking studies (here's one) to see where people look first on websites. Try experimenting with things other than putting it in a list and putting it next to the Forum link.

Given all of the above points, what else can you conclude other than that there are indeed incompetent users? Heck, even the users themselves think that incompetent users exist.

The other side of the coin is that users don't always suggest the best solutions. I'll admit that there's a reason you're the website designer and they're not. Use your intuition, but don't let it blind you to alternatives that better fit how people other than yourself see your website. Probably the best thing you could do is watch a few people use your site who haven't seen it before. Watch what they do.

Or maybe try out Google Analytics's site overlay feature to see where most people click. Do they try multiple links before hitting the forum? How many leave the front page without downloading the app or going to the forums? All of this information is interesting and useful, whether or not it matches your perceptions.

fun speculation, along the same lines: http://poynterextra.org/epic/ .

I worked in newsrooms for a lot of years, and lived through several redesigns of print products. A tool that was really useful was Eyetrack, a tool that improves reader studies by strapping a camera to their head and documenting which page feature (headlines, photos, text) catch the reader's eye. This has been used in newspaper redesigns since the early 1990, and was also used in a major study of online news sites in 2004. There's a lot of data there that is based on readers' actual practice, rather than conjecture about what editors' or consultants believe about design. I think the 2004 study helped a lot of online news sites improve their designs, as it confirmed advice that many web experience professionals had been sharing with newspapers.

For those who don't keep up to date with Windows Vista's and Office 12's new general purpose fonts to succeed Trebuchet, Verdana, etc, here's what he's talking about:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683

More characters and better previews here, but in Flash:

http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/

Personally, I agree that these fonts look good and professional (I like Consolas too as the new monospace font, it always annoyed me that Courier / Courier New had tons of "serifs" or whatever you'd call all those pointy things). Microsoft does some things pretty good -- web fonts, like Verdana and these new ones, and computer mice are two. :-)

That is because your mind plays tricks with you. In this case, the image you see outside contained more red than other colors. Your mind will compensate for this by adding the opposite color (on the color wheel) to the image. For red, the opposite color is green. Here's a link that contains much information about this.

Yeah, I know, this probably belongs in the Politics section.

But what powertool modded this "Funny"?!? Maybe I should register after all...

-Dave

Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.

My favorite example of this is Cyc, a project to feed into a database all the propositions which some believe constitute "common sense." For example, Cyc knows that dogs and cats are mammals, and that they are common pets, so one could tell it "I have a mammal as a pet," and it could deduce that I have a dog or a cat or maybe something else. In the early 1990s, when the project was getting started, its researchers believed that in about five years, it would be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it well enough to assimilate into its database. At that point, of course, it would start absorbing all the knowledge in the world until it became the smartest encyclopedia there was.

And then in the last 1990s, its researchers were again interviewed, and again they said that it would soon be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it. When? In about five years. For any time T, strong AI is always about five years away.

So I'm amused that the strong AI postulated in that excellent Flash animation, the key which allows "big media" to die off because computers will do custom rewrites of amateur news dispatches and form newsfeeds of their own, comes to pass in... about five years. I don't think the New York Times has much to worry about.

There is a lot of good research out there on how to use the data gathered form eye tracking. You can test web site designs and expose weaknesses in design, for example. You can also use eye tracking as an input device (PDF). I like that it can tell you what people read on the internet.

Just remember, what matters is how the technology is applied, not the technology itself. Without users, you just have slabs of technology sitting there. People make this stuff interesting.