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Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots
danieltdp writes "Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.' Nearly half of them said all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs."
They didn't care if malware got installed on the researchers computers. Most university owned machines that are publicly accessible (e.g. in the library) get ghosted frequently. It doesn't matter what you do to them - tomorrow they will have a fresh install anyway.
My roommates' daughter, who isn't old enough to read yet, can navigate menus on the Nintendo Wii by using trial and error to determine which button "works" and which button "doesn't work" to get where she wants, then (with repetition) memorizing the position or appearance of the correct button. She has absolutely no idea what any of the text says if it isn't accompanied by pictures, but she only occasionally needs help navigating.
Shouldn't we expect better from adults using a computer?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Programmers continue to use them because they effectively move responsibility. Yes, they fail, but when they fail it's suddenly the user's fault, so the programmer is happy with the result.
Of course this is bad UI and the failure is ultimately that of the programmer, but this is not how it's perceived now, so programmers will continue to use them even if they know full well that they don't do the job.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Story time:
Early in my career, I worked with a helpdesk tech who was hired more or less because he had certifications out the ying yang. So one day, he comes to me and he says, "I'm having a problem with this computer. It just won't work and I can't figure out why."
So I went with him back to the workbench and said, "Ok, show me what the problem is."
He booted up the machine and logged in. Everything looked fine. He navigated through the start menu, found the shortcut for Microsoft Word, and clicks on it. It takes a second before anything happens, and then a little window pops up with what looks like an error message. The tech immediately hits ok, and then sits there for another minute before turning to me and saying, "See. Word won't start."
I said, "Ok, well what did that error message say?"
He responds, "wha?"
I ask him to try running it again, he does, and when the error message comes up again, he again immediately hits the OK button. I say, "That! That error message. What did it say?" and he comes back again, "Huh?"
I get him to run it a third time, and ask him to take his hands off the mouse and put them in his lap until I tell him he can touch the mouse again. The third time, the error message pops up again and says, "Error: missing msvcrt.dll." (just making that up, but it was missing some DLL) I copy the DLL over from another machine and it works again.
True story. I'm not sure if there's a lesson in there somewhere, but it seemed like a relevant story.
Displaying something only the OS should know is an interesting idea... like let the users customize a window border by splattering paint and then it might be blatantly obvious which windows were their personal design, and which were fakes (different splatter pattern and different colors.) Has anybody seen anything like that implemented?
Not with window dialogs, but I've seen several browser & email plugins that use user-defined images to guard against phishing. The idea is that you assign your image to www.yourbanksite.example, then the browser will show that image whenever you visit that page... but if you end up visiting www.yourbankslte.com instead, it won't show the image, and you'll be able to notice that more clearly than the fact that the spelling is off.
It's also kind of similar to the icon that Yahoo lets you set on your login form.
My sister-in-law took her car into the shop, asking to have all the warning lights and buzzers deactivated, as they were bothering her.
The service manager was somewhat reluctant to do this, thinking, no doubt, that if he went ahead with the work, it would come back to haunt him. She insisted, reasoning that these things had never happened to her before in all the years she's been driving. Five years later, she's still happy at the thought that she "took charge" of the situation. She likes to tell this story because, to her, it proves that she was right all along.
Sure, I have to agree, at the core it's a matter of priorities. But I think it's one in which simple not-caring has eroded further into not-caring-to-understand. We can laugh a bit inasmuch as it applies to ordinary people, but I find myself alarmed as this almost Orwellian regression from critical thinking into reactivity becomes more fashionable.
That's because it's not just ordinary people but also many trusted individuals who are afflicted. I've lost count of the number of IT managers and network staff who reason anecdotally, who can't seem to distinguish between different subsystems or levels of abstraction, or who don't even consistently apply commonplace notions of causality. These people may be smart and successful, but I find them hard to have as colleagues.
Physicians and car mechanics, on the other hand, seem to have somehow avoided the worst of this erosion. At least, that's what I've observed. I can't explain what, if anything, might set them apart from other technical professionals.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
And how is this supposed to show that users are ID10Ts? With the exception of the quotes that is pretty much the same crap folks are used to getting in error boxes since the days of Win95. As a PC repairman I have seen some dumb users in my time(the video.exe pr0n bug comes to mind) but I would never blame a customer for falling for that.
And let's face it,the simple fact of the matter is the user doesn't have to be an ID10T anymore,thanks to the way browsers and the Internet have conditioned most folks that the occasional download will be necessary to get through the day. The "you need a codec" dialog,the "Your flash is too old,here is the update" dialog,and don't even get me started on JavaScript and driveby malware.IMHO we are pushing this script heavy "Web 2.0" crap too fast without taking the time to worry about the average user and security.
For example,the browser should be set up with the major vendors addresses so that if you need a new version of flash,it will refuse any web links and take you straight to Adobe. And IMHO we need to really rethink JScript,perhaps with a no execute "penalty box" that can be scanned for malware before being allowed to run. Because as it is I'm giving my customers Noscript and teaching them to use it just to cut down on the malware. But the time of "blame the user" is mostly past(although I still laugh at how many fall for video.exe looking for pr0n).With so many online now,and that number going nowhere but up,we really need to work on it so the average Joe won't need a degree just to use the web. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.