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How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog (anniemueller.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 78 points 1 year ago (9 children)

At least once in their life, every tech person should be forced to teach someone like my mum how to use a piece of technology.

That will very quickly change your perspective on what counts as user friendly.

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  • [–] 69 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Pretty sure every tech person at some point or another has had to do exactly that. And not just their mom, but their dad, and their extended family, and their parent’s friends who have a random problem, etc

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    And why? Because none of them can read the fucking manual! And you'll say they don't try, but many of them have tried. Once. And all they learned was that it wouldn't do them any good.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Because the manual often doesn't cover what they're trying to do, or finding reliable information online is it's own struggle.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I taught basic computer literacy. I am a software developer. It's tough to reframe my own knowledge so drastically, but the new perspective also makes me question why so many things are wrong with current tech (particularly UI/UX).

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    I think the issue is that you need to understand who your users actually are. Documentation for a library intended to be used by a reasonably competent software engineer is going to have different requirements vs documentation for a cli utility aimed at Arch btw Linux users vs documentation for a program to help Grandma organize family photos.

    If you throw a terminal command at Grandma she's going to panic and call her grandchild. If you put instructions for extracting a tarball in your library docs the programmer is going to get bored and skip ahead.

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