Research Proving People Don't RTFM, Resent 'Over-Featured' Products, Wins Ig Nobel Prize (improbable.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Thursday the humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research held their 28th annual ceremony recognizing the real (but unusual) scientific research papers "that make people laugh, then think." And winning this year's coveted Literature prize was a paper titled "Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products," which concluded that most people really, truly don't read the manual, "and most do not use all the features of the products that they own and use regularly..."

"Over-featuring and being forced to consult manuals also appears to cause negative emotional experiences."

Another team measured "the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile," which won them the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Other topics of research included self-colonoscopies, removing kidney stones with roller coasters, and (theoretical) cannibalism. "Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds," reports Ars Technica, "strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl nicknamed 'Miss Sweetie-Poo,' who will interrupt those who exceed the time limit by repeating, 'Please stop. I'm bored.' Until they stop."
You can watch the whole wacky ceremony on YouTube. The awards are presented by actual Nobel Prize laureates -- and at least one past winner of an Ig Nobel Prize later went on to win an actual Nobel Prize.

Comments

Something worth keeping in mind!

[Gravis Zero]

When you are architecting software, this is actually something you should keep in mind. If you keep things simple then people can actually use your software. However, if you complicate things because you're "smarter" than the users then you can congratulate yourself on that but you have failed the users despite your length documentation.

Re:Something worth keeping in mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have in the past rewritten a number of manuals nobody read. These generally were a mess, with misleading chapter and paragraph titles, information about some subjects was scattered all over the place, contradictory and incomplete. After I finished with it the structure was logical, titles were descriptive and designed to match questions people would have, information was complete, correct and not scattered around, and the size of the manual typically was about 1/4 of the original.

People still didn't read it.

Re:Something worth keeping in mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do, or at least try to, read the manual. But then I'm a sysadmin. Even so, I typically don't read the entire thing because it's just too tedious, annoying, incomprehensible, or whatever. Most manuals suck giant balls through tiny straws. I try to get a general sense of the thing and fill in the needed-now blanks until it functions enough to make do, and maybe will get back to making it do more later. I typically notice soon enough when I need more power, at which point I'll re-check the manual and if unsatisfactory might have to conclude I'm in need of a different tool to get the job done.

Even those manuals ostensibly written for professional manual-readers like me tend to uselessness: Take almost any "reference manual" for networking equipment. It'll be chock-full of "foo bar <parameter>: Set the bar parameter to the foo subsystem", in the case of CLI and lots of pictures on how to click your way around the equivalent GUI setting. But no word on what it means, how it relates to the rest, what you can do with it, when you might need it, gotchas and other considerations. All conspicuously missing.

This was one big large selling point for Unix, in that it came with honest manpages. Written in troff so they're the same whether nroff puts'em on your screen or you look'em up in the paper version (or print them yourself). That typesetter, incidentally, was the killer app for Unix within AT&T. But I digress. Those manpages are written for technicians to get shit done. Good ones tell you what the thing does, how to make it dance, what not to do, and what to watch out for. They work, for a very specific audience.

It doesn't surprise me that people trained from birth that everything is supposed to be "intuitive, no training needed" will not bother with the manual, certainly not seeing the quality of said manuals. It doesn't really bother me that people don't read manuals, since most people are followers--they'll only learn if someone shows'em. So maybe it's a good idea to bring back those classes "learn to use your computer" you used to get with your (professional get-shit-done hardware) purchase in the microcomputer era. It does bother me when I need to make hardware dance and the manual turns out to be unreadable and wrong.

80/20 rule

[rsilvergun]

80% of your users only use 20% of your features. But it's a different 20% for everyone. Eventually you get to the point where everyone's got that one little feature they can't live without. That's where you get lock in from. It's how Microsoft keeps their office monopoly in the face of competition from Open Office and the like.

There are manuals, then there are manuals

[bobstreo]

There's nothing I hate more than trying to figure out what some dyslexic English as a Third Language moron created using Google Translate actually meant.

Then there are the manuals that contain proper English that repeat everything, except the answer you actually need.

I had bookshelves full of Microsoft, Oracle and Solaris manuals that (with the advent of reasonably good search engines) I quickly tossed into the recycling bin,

Re:There are manuals, then there are manuals

[hey!]

Then there are manuals that are full of cautions meant to absolve the vendor of legal liability if you do something incredibly stupid with their product, but don't actually help you use the product for its intended purpose.

WI TFM?

[Mats Svensson]

Usually, people who tell others to "RTFM" have no idea where TFM is, or if there even is a FM, or if TFM covers the F subject.
They just blurt it out as if they get a cracker every time they do.

BWAAACK
RTFM!
RTFM!
RTFM!
RTFM!
RTFM!
RTFM!
BWAAACK

Research like this is why software is crap

[Ashthon]

Research like this is causing software to be increasingly dumbed down to a point where it is extremely difficult to use. In the past you could configure software to work in a way you found desirable and productive, but now all the sophisticated is being removed and you're forced to work the way the UX designers dictate. Take Firefox:

• You used to be able to enable or disable the status bar depending on your preference, but the UX designs thought such an option was confusing so they removed the status bar entirely.
• You used to have a usable search box with a drop down list of search engines, but the UX designers though words were confusing so they turned the search box into an unusable mess, and now it's easier to visit the site and perform a search than deal with the search box.
• You used to be able to have the tabs above or below the address bar, but the UX designs decided to force everyone to have the tabs at the top (you can still get them at the bottom via userChrome.css).
• The easy to access menu bars are slowly being replaced by the cumbersome hamburger button which can't even be hidden without resorting to userChrome.css.
• Bookmarks used to default to the Bookmarks Menu, but now they default to "Other Bookmarks" which causes them to be unfindable. You have to use an extension just to get the bookmarks to be saved where you want.

I could go on all day with Firefox, but dumbing down of the browser by removing features and options has turned it into a nightmare to use. The same is very much true of Windows 10 which is an absolute train wreck. I've found myself increasingly moving away from commercial software produced by UX designers to FOSS produced by programmers simply because I want software that works.

The thing is, it's not just technical users who hate what UX designers are doing to software, and casual users I speak to also hate the constant UI changes, the hiding of features and the removal of options. Now here we have some worthless 'intellectuals' being given a Nobel Prize for telling people to fuck up their software.

It's little wonder we're moving to a world where computes are becoming less sophisticated and turning into machines for running 'apps' that you can only get from a curated store that bans anything remotely useful. With the direction computing is headed, I think I'll just go and live in a cave.

Re:Research like this is why software is crap

[AmiMoJo]

I bought my mum a Chromebook because Windows and Firefox were confusing for her. She's not a novice, she actually had training in Windows and Office, but there is still a lot of crap that she can't handle.

So there is utility in being simple. What we need is apps that have a simple mode and a power user mode. Considering how flexible the Firefox UI is supposed to be it seems like they missed an opportunity there.

Re:Boy that sucks

[mwvdlee]

What consititutes "reading the manual"? If it means reading every word from front to back then "No". If it means "scanning it from front to back and reading the parts that I care about, then "Yes".

UI for work flow, not reflecting the internals

[raymorris]

In my experience, applications that have enough different features an complexity to really be a problem often support doing several different tasks. Often it can be made much more usable by designing a UI around the distinct jobs one can do using the software, a UI based on workflow. I'm not going to say wizards exactly, but UI flows designed for specific tasks the user wants to accomplish.

The UI often represents the underlying underlying data rather than the tasks. You know for sure that you have this kind of UI if it has different sections for different kinds of objects. Of these different kinds of objects map to different table in your database, you definitely have a data-centric UI instead of a task-centric one.

My server backup software originally had a data-centric UI. It was basically alot like managing hosting accounts. It had a page for servers - listing, adding, removing, and editing them. It had a page for DNS names - adding, removing, and editing them. There were a couple other pages like that, for manahaing the objects in the application. That worked great for me. Users didn't like it.

We added another UI that started with this page:
Add a new server
Restore file or server
Manage billing
Other tasks

Clicking "add a new server" took the user through the steps of adding a new server - including any domain names related to that server. Clicking "restore a file or server" took them through the steps to do that. At each step, the only saw the options relevant to that step.

The task-centric model is a great way to manage complexity. The data-centric UI can also be useful at times, but it's inherently more difficult to learn and use in many cases. Some applications warrant having both options. We kept both for the server backup system. Customers used the task-centric, wizard-like UI for common tasks. For less-common tasks, the data-centric UI was more flexible.

Intuitive UI

[Kokuyo]

Yes, well... Is it a surprise when they've tossed all that we've learned about UI making?

Clickable objects are no longer clearly marked as such. Different kinds of content are no longer clearly distinguished from one another. Contectual information on mouse-over or right click or even F1 is hit and miss, but usually miss.

And be honest, how often do you go "What kind of moron from Bizarro Land would name this function that and put it there??!!".

Or lists... on one frame, it's exportable on the second it's sortable and on the third you can do multi-selection. But not one of them can do all three.

Not to forget that if whatever you are using happens to have multi-platform apps, GUIs or whatever, you can bet your ass they won't have been developed by the same team. So you not only need to handle each and every single app with a lot of TLC for them to even remotely do what you want, you'll have to learn to do it differently on your MacOS laptop, on your Android phone and on your Windows desktop. If you're especially lucky, the online interface will behave differently depending on the browser too.

And let's be exceptionally frank here, writing a good manual is an artform few have ever mastered. 90% of my use cases I find my answers on some message board online and certainly not in a manual.

OR, as it's the case with our current backup software, the manual is easily 1000 pages. Now, if I were tasked solely with pampering our backup software, you could argue that that is doable and you'd be right. But I also have to pamper the storage environment (with several products, of course), the Cisco UCS, SAN infrastructure and Vmware Virtualization as a cherry on top.

And in order to not kill motherfuckers daily, I strictly adhere to my 8 hour work days, except for emergencies and maintenance tasks that cannot be done on hours.

So imagine this new-fangled dohicky coming along expecting me to forego everything I thought I knew about gadgets and do it their way now because reasons. Yeaaah, no. Go fuck yourself, would you kindly?

Re:Intuitive UI

[hey!]

A lot of this is "design" as artistic expression rather than design as functional communication. And I suspect it's not people who are trained as designers but product managers with delusions of artistic ability. Or its marketers obscuring function with emotional messages that crowd out function.

Microsoft is particularly guilty of marketing communication trumping function. Microsoft Office's interface was pretty much as good as it needed to be by the mid 90s, with the exception of bug and security fixes, which are worth paying for, but not visible to users. But whenever Microsoft does a major update to a product that is used by end-users, they shuffle around functions so the user sees he's getting something different than he had before. UIs targeted at back end people tend to suffer less pointless change.

I don't RTFM and hate over-featured apps. Why?

[franzrogar]

I don't RTFM ever (only did to learn how a programming language works and the language needed to code in it).

GUIs are normally built foolproof (read the icon pop-up title and you'll know what it does). Puntually, I search for a very very specific question.

So, I don't RTFM and still I'm able to work with the programs.

I DO HATE over-featured apps. Seriously, I DON'T NEED an e-mail app that also searchs the web and can track my next flying. It's a f*cking E-MAIL APP.

If I wanted a SUISSE-KNIFE APP, I would have installed that. Then, WHY ON HELL I want my e-maill app to waste phone data (that I pay for) searching the web in the background, turn on my GPS (wasting battery life) even when I don't want it to, and give my personal data to flying companies (when I explicitly forbade it)?

I don't want stinky over-featured apps. Well, my bad, I HATE over-featured apps.

To the article's point

[DaMattster]

Yes, I am starting to become resentful of all of the technology forced upon me and I don't RTFM. I personally hate the whole so-called Internet of Things. I neither want nor need a smart TV and smart refrigerator. The whole IoT thing is like a solution searching for a problem.

Canon and Kyocera, I'm looking at you

[quonset]

Canon and Kyocera have to have some of the most egregious manuals out there. Canon in particular will start with a section (let's say how to input an IP address into a printer), but in addition to the few steps to do this, they will have 5-6 extraneous, and completely unnecessary sub-sections which point to something else but don't make it clear if you need to follow those steps.

Or worse, they'll point you to another section somewhere else in the manual, even though you're at the part where logically, that part comes next.

It is quite obvious the people making manuals don't work with the software/hardware but rely on the engineers to tell them what to write. And engineers don't know what to write because to them it all makes sense since they work with the software/hardware.

As an aside, my credit union's telephone banking has become essentially unusable since they changed systems. Based on the hoops one now has to jump through, it is quite clear the software developers have never used a phone tree. Without exaggeration, every option pressed leads to a voice telling you, "Okay, let's do X" or "Wait while I do X".

This explains why manuals are so poorly done. The people don't have a clue what they're doing.

Re: Connections

[alvinrod]

Reminds me of an old joke: What did the cannibal do after he dumped his girlfriend?

Wipe his ass.