🔗 Your software is confusing

If something in your software is confusing to a customer, it is confusing.

It is! There is something about it, that you might not see, that doesn’t make sense to a nonzero number of your customers. Stop trying to outsmart the bug report and consider it.

Will you encounter a few outlier customers who are hard to please? A few more who struggle with what seem like obvious interfaces? Yes and yes.

Most customers, however, are people of average patience and competency who just want the thing to work. They’d prefer not to ask for help. They tried to solve the problem themselves.

My inspiration is Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. Steve argues that we should ask our users to make as few arbitrary decisions as possible. When they’re thinking, you’re losing. And so, we aren’t thinking about a customer being confused as “bad.” We’re thinking about how long they are confused as a metric to minimize.

As the software writer, you’re immune to being confused by the software. You know too much. You aren’t a customer. You take the path of least resistance. Customers do the opposite, and it when it doesn’t work, they’re stuck.

Let’s retire the phrase “user error” from the software lexicon. It’s not solution-focused, and it offers a tantalizing mirage: the error is “their” fault. What’s happening instead is that users are doing what the software affords, signifies, and allows, regardless of what you imagined.

Even if it was “user error”, whatever that means, what then? We’re going to call every stuck customer and teach them how to make a purchase? Technologists with any scale don’t have that luxury. Why allow it for yourself?

What if the customer’s proposed solution doesn’t make sense? It rarely does. To quote comedian Bill Hader: “I’ve learned that when people give you notes on something, when they tell you what’s wrong they’re usually right, when they tell you how to fix it they’re usually wrong.” Their solution is bad and the software is confusing.

Dismissing difficult feedback is wasteful. It’s more profitable to start from the idea that each bug report is worth considering. And easier, because you’re seeing outliers for what they are, while allowing the majority of issues to get a fair hearing. Not every bug report is gold, and you can’t fix them all, but start from the assumption that the bug report you’re reading is worth reading.

Don’t waste time deciding if it is confusing. It is. Assume it’s valid, ask why, and consider fixing it.