I just came across an article on Hacker News about how unskilled most (like 90%, not like 51%) computer users are.

The article included “10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software“. It’s a great read.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while designing web apps, it’s the old cliche’ that you are not your user.

Have you ever walked through your app from start to finish?

Do it now. It’s unbelievable. But do only what each screen explicitly tells you to do.

Assume nothing. Assume you literally forgot everything you knew before you got to where you were.

Assume you know the very basics of using an web app: left clicking, what a window is, how to open your email.

How usable is that new feature now? Would the proverbial grandma know how to navigate through your app?

Are you talking to your users in a way they can understand?

Today’s Groupon Chicago deal was 50% off at the Gap. Berly loves shopping at the Gap, so I wanted to snatch one of these up for her.

So did the rest of Chicago, so Groupon’s site crawled to a slow and eventually crashed.

But Groupon apparently saw this coming and took preemptative measures.

Instead of showing the generic “Server is not responding” or a cutesy little page featuring a plumber, Groupon took advantage of the opportunity to grab more email addresses:

Information about what happened, showing that they were aware of it, and asking for your email address so they can tell you when it’s back. It’s a great example of how to handle a server crash.

Groupon didn’t let a spike in traffic annihilate their business. They used it to their advantage.

The screen I saw after I signed up for Help a Reporter Out:

The parts of the screen I paid attention to before closing the tab (literally) 1 second later:

Your user is signing up for an email newsletter, not signing for a mortgage.

Keep your confirmation and success page succinct and to the point.

I wrote the other day about Posterous’s great apology email. It’s a really great email, but there was no way to easily respond do it. (Ben points out that they had the same message up on their blog with comments enabled.)

I’ve been testing AeroFS as a Dropbox replacement for a couple of weeks. Yesterday, I received an email from one of their founders:

Hey Jeff,

I’m sending out emails to all our early users to get as much feedback
as I can about the AeroFS experience. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time,
but realistically, I know there’s still a lot of bugs for us to fix.
Some of them are obvious (we get crash logs), others less so.

[...blah blah blah...]

But, most importantly: If you have any comments or feedback (things
that work well, or don’t work at all), I’d love to hear them!

Cheers,
Yuri.

I could hit reply and respond directly to Yuri with my thoughts on AeroFS, any bugs I’ve encountered or I could just tell him to screw off.* It’s not revolutionary, it’s not hard, it’s just human. And it’s great.

Not to mention, the P.S. on his email is spot on:

P.S. I know these emails look templated, but I am sending them
manually to each user, I’M ALIVE!!

A nice (human) touch from beginning to end.

* I didn’t tell him to screw off

Posterous apparently had a pretty rocky week.

A Denial of Service attack on August 4th caused the site to slow to a crawl and completely go down for an hour. They used this opportunity to move their servers to a new datacenter which is obviously going to cause even more downtime. But they responded quickly, posting updates on the blog when posting an update made sense. They stayed in front of the story and didn’t even make TechCrunch. High five!

Then today, Posterous’s Cofounder and CEO Sachin Agarwal sent an email to (presumably) all users. It’s a great email. He explained what happened, why it happened and how they fixed the problem for the long term.

But most importantly, he apologized:

While we were certainly frustrated, we know that no one was more frustrated than you. Your website was down, and I humbly apologize for that. Know that throughout these six days, restoring your site and your trust has been our number one priority.

It’s a heart-felt apology from the guy at the top. It’s a good thing.

I hardly ever read (let alone reply to) emails like this. But I’ve been there with sites like Lookit, so I wanted to reply back with some kind of “way to be” or “go get some sleep” or whatever.

But I couldn’t! The email came from no-reply@posterous.com.

Email is a two-way street. Even if it’s just an apology, give your users a way to respond to it.

Every email that comes from Lookit is sent from jeff@playlookit.com. If someone needs to vent, they just hit reply, type their message and send it (in fact, it’s actually encouraged in a lot of the emails that go out to Lookit players). They don’t even have to go to the site to figure out how to get in touch with me. I get constant feedback without even asking.

If you think you’d get inundated with too many replies, or if you’re not comfortable giving out your personal email address, then just create a new one. When the crowdSPRING newsletter goes out to more than 65,000 email addresses, it’s from thecrew@crowdspring.com. Every reply goes to the founders and the marketing department guy.

You’ll get responses, and you’ll get a lot of them. But that’s the point. If your users are giving you permission to email them, the least you can do is give it back.

Whitney Hess is one of the most outspoken proponents of UX online these days. And she’s good at it, to boot!

In an article on 52 Weeks of UX, she basically tells the rest of the Internet ‘ur doin it wrong”:

Most people believe that User Experience is just about finding the best solution for your users — but it’s not. UX is about defining the problem that needs to be solved (the why), defining the types of people who need it to be solved (the who), and defining the way in which it should be solved to be relevant to those people (the how). Yet as a rule, startups are being built on the what.

Read the entire article on 52 Weeks of UX here »