this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Ha! I have the exact same issue with people and dialogues, like "Okay... did you read it? What did it say?" Somehow they don't seem to understand that there are words on the screen which are there to tell them information.
I think it might be some kind of expectation that since it's a dialogue on a computer it's automatically going to be something complex and technical.
A couple of years back the company I worked for developed a website for this other company. Our point of contact had previously worked with us at a previous company, so he knew people at our company already. He had the designer's phone number (mistake) and would frequently just call her the moment he hit send on an email. "Hey did you see my email???"
He absolutely refused to learn how computers worked, at all, which was odd given his role was lead for digital marketing. One stand-out moment was when he emailed us "URGENT FIX NOW!!! WEBSITE BROKEN!" The designer and I both freaked out for a second, until we checked the site and everything seemed to be working correctly. We then asked him what exactly was wrong with it, and he sent a photo of his laptop screen. In the system tray, the internet icon was crossed out.
Dude had a laptop with one of those physical wifi switches. He'd switched it off, tried to access the website. Then gone on his phone to email us that it wasn't working. The error message was along the lines of "You don't have an internet connection."
I no longer have contact with clients, and it's a blessing.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. They expect that they won't be able to understand or act on any sort of computer problem. That's what I was hoping people would figure out from experience - that they don't have to be scared to read it, click around and give it a try.
I dealt with similar things when we had a fairly busy website back in the PHP/MySQL days, around 2008-09. My business partner was a great designer but not technical at all, and was a bit uptight about our site. She didn't report imaginary problems, but if there was any sort of service interruption she'd act like it was the end of the world and stress me out about it even more than i was already stressed. I still wonder whether it would have been better to just run the site by myself.
I tried helping my ex brother in law over the phone and he couldn't grasp the concept of right clicking. I told him to just hold on and I would help him when I was back in town.
I know he knows how to right click but when given the instruction to right click on something he somehow forgets what a right click is.