"You've hijacked my computer"

[mmcirvin]

Mitchell Baker makes a fascinating post about people who accidentally change the engine for the Firefox search bar from Google to Creative Commons:

There are undoubtedly many people who do this intentionally, as I do when I'm looking for a photo I can use for some purpose. But these folks must have done so inadvertently because they called Creative Commons to complain. And not gently - the messages were angry, along the lines of: "You've hijacked my computer." "You've taken away Google and put yourself in their place." "I can't believe that an organization like Creative Commons would behave in this manner."

[...] What strikes me is not that people are angry. What strikes me is the number of people who feel their computer is out of control and that things are happening that they don't understand and don't trust, and the enormous level of pent-up frustration that surrounds many people trying to find their way on the web.

Some of the comments are dismissive of the intelligence of the people who run into this. Some get it right: this is a user interface problem. It's kind of cool that you can change the search engine for the bar right there by popping a menu out of the little icon, but if people can easily change it accidentally without even realizing that anything happened (the icon is likely not meaningful to most users) or being able to tell how to make it change back, there's something wrong with the design. A lot of good user interface design is just being sympathetic and willing to make changes when things like this happen, as they will. Creative Commons is only one of several engines in the pop-up menu, so the actual problem must be several times larger.

(Safari has a similar-looking menu, but it just calls up previous searches; the search bar itself seems hardwired to Google, at least with the existing preferences GUI. That seems wrong too; I'd like to change the search bar if Google becomes more evil than somebody else. But, then, I'm one of those power users.)

Addendum: One of the commenters mentioned that Creative Commons actually has a special advisory page up about this. This strikes me as the Web equivalent of a handwritten sign taped on the wall, always a handy indicator that something is broken.

Comments

[lots42.livejournal.com]

IMHO, handwritten signs taped to the wall are usually a sign the customer's brain is broken.

[factitiouslj.livejournal.com]

And if the situation causes many customers to have broken brains, it's ill-suited for use with customers, and should be redesigned.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

It's a good point, that if a lot of people don't understand the way something works, the problem is the product, not the people.

However, and I say this with a lot of years of customer service under my belt, people who have access to a help number, especially an 800 #, will call the number before trying any solutions themselves. At the first sign of trouble they will call for help, especially if they're already of the opinion that the product will be difficult to work.

My extremely convincing anecdotal evidence is when we switched software when I was in the Mutual call center. Satellite offices who had never processed policies before were given a plain, point-and-click program that was poorly designed. Our call center was to help the offices with insurance questions, but we ended up fielding basic tech help questions: I can't get this to print, I'm unable to connect to the Internet for an MVR, my radio buttons aren't working, how can I save my work to finish for later. Since I was the most computer savvy in the group (which is a big DANGER WILL ROBINSON sign right there, let me tell you) I spent all day helping people configure and use this new software. 99.44% of these people never tried anything on their own before calling, and never thought to call the actual tech help department.

With the Internet, most people are convinced that everything out there is a virus, spam, or the work of a hacker, thanks to constant media stories about the horrors of evil haxxor d00ds.