[WEB4LIB] Re: In defense of stupid users

[K.G. Schneider]

> I agree that "our job is either to give them the right tools for the job
> or do the job for them."  And for many users, a simple tool like Google
> will be adequate.  However, I think it is wrong to think that just
> because a user is happy their information need has been met.  And
> sometimes, the right tool for a job is hard to use; that's not
> arrogance, that's a fact of life.

Actually, I think many users are smart and that by and large the user is not
broken. Users come to the Internet with a handful of skills from their life
knowledge and quickly learn that they can satisfy many information needs
with Google searching. On their own they can bank, pay taxes, amuse
themselves, locate people and places, find things to buy, track packages,
check the TV schedule, and on and on. It's not as good, by our exacting
standards, as the type of searching that requires driving to a library or
making a phone call, but it fulfills many needs, even if not as well as if
they learned some obscure, difficult tool. No one on Sex and the City has
ever said, "Do an advanced search in Proquest on that guy--oh, be sure to
search the abstracts." 

Also, the user is smart in the sense that he or she brings task knowledge to
each new tool and assesses the tool accordingly. If a new tool is needlessly
hard to use--which I believe is the point that was originally made--then the
user is going to have trouble using it. What is to bring the user back to
that tool again? If we're counting on specialized user training, we lost
that battle because most people don't need to go through us any more to get
to a computer and the Internet. 

This is in part about approach. You can approach the problem as if the user
were stupid, in which case you grudgingly toss a keyword search box their
way and spend your time designing complex interfaces only a librarian could
love, or you could approach the problem with the idea that the user is
filled with information about how we should design our services. Making a
service usable by your users without them acquiring separate, special
knowledge is not dumbing down the system, it's smartening it up. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com