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Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the at-my-office-they-all-are dept.

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."

3 of 568 comments (clear)

  1. or it could have been by itamblyn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic by Free+the+Cowards · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:Even more importantly... by nine-times · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.