Popup Study Confirms Most Users Are Idiots 568
danieltdp writes "Testing students at a University, psychologists made many of them click on a dialog box that in effect said: 'You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By clicking yes you are failing the Windows Darwin Test.' Nearly half of them said all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs."
NOT: (was Re:Summary is WRONG) (Score:3, Insightful)
Summary is under ENTERTAINMENT. Tag says HUMOR. If it had been accurately reporting on the study, it would have been under SCIENCE. Read all the words.
More power to them (Score:5, Insightful)
Quit bugging me. Much more work needs to be done to eliminate "Are you sure?" requests. Working undo is always better than asking the user and making him regret the answer seconds later.
Wrong conclusion (Score:2, Insightful)
Same general psychological area as the boy who cried wolf.
Re:NOT: (was Re:Summary is WRONG) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More power to them (Score:3, Insightful)
That was my thought, I largely stopped reading those dialogs back sometime in the mid 90s because they were basically all identical and they conveyed basically no information either.
If MS or really anybody else were serious about this sort of problem they'd stop popping up so many of those windows. Really just having a small status screen at like the lower left which listed those things would be a good start. That way only serious problems would need a window. Better yet if MS could ditch the hearing impairing error chime, the one that's always like 10x as loud as the rest of the sounds on the computer.
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:3, Insightful)
And more interestingly, the study says that most users are in fact *not* idiots, but that a distressingly high percentage (almost half) are.
Not that I have any objections towards a happy pattern of contempt toward everyone, but I prefer my contempt be fact based - {G}.
Pug
Too much interference (Score:5, Insightful)
This was not surprising and I don't place all the blame on the users.
There's a similar situation with semi experienced administrators. They may configure logging and monitoring on a system. Being security paranoid, they set the log level fairly low so they end up getting lots of alerts.
Somewhere along the line, however, the administrator stops paying as much attention. Maybe a CPU alert hits 100% every night. Then one day someone in Finance runs a half-assed join across a gateway and brings down a DB. The admin gets the alert but has gotten so used to them that it was ignored. This is worse than if he'd never gotten the alert at all.
The alerts that OSes put up (Vista, for example) and the host of browser and AV and IDE warnings get useless after a while. The system should do this transparently and not rely on the user to be the MAC layer.
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this says as much about the users as it does the usability of our computers.
Computers are commodity items now, the days where nerds interested in technical details were the primary demographic are long gone. People just want to do their job and move on with life, they don't care about memory registers or malware they just want to not be interrupted.
It really illustrates how dialog boxes as a warning system are a flawed mechanic, we got this fancy computer with a fancy operating system, why can't it figure out the right thing to do when an application tries to access memory it's not supposed to?
Guess my point is if we put as much effort into error handling and/or malware detection as we do our whiz-bang graphics, it might not even be a problem anymore.
Re:or it could have been (Score:5, Insightful)
This was my thought too. Study participants were asked to give their opinion on a web site. If they close the offending window, they'd be unable to give their opinion on that website. If they just clicked through, they stand a chance of getting to the web site, and whatever happens to that terminal is none of their business. So these 'idiot' users were just following instructions.
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
The attitude that users who do something wrong are idiots is a large part of why computers, operating systems and applications are generally pretty shit. They're made by and for geeks, not normal people. If 1% of your users do the wrong thing they may well be idiots. If 50% of your users are doing the wrong thing, you are the idiot for designing your software so badly half the population can't use it.
(I mean "you" in the general sense, not the parent specifically)
The users aren't qualified to make these decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
And frankly they shouldn't have to be. I have no idea why developers seem to think they should/are. Fail safe and log it so someone who does understand what's happening can make an alternative choice.
Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just Windows either. Apps in Gnome, KDE and OpenOffice also open up stupid dialogs.
It is unreasonable to consider training users to be driven by popups. What would make more sense is for programmers to design their pop up use better so that it is more meaningful for the user.
Re:Wrong conclusion (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that in many cases, it is impossible to determine what the 'right thing' is. The computer has little way of knowing what the actual problem is. Computers only do as they are told. If a computer is told by a website to pop up a dialog box, then it will do so, regardless of the intention of content of the box. Likewise, if the computer has an error, and is programmed to report that error, it will do so. Are you saying that we should not have error alerts, or that popups should not be allowed?
No, shows that most students are idiots (Score:2, Insightful)
"Testing students at a University, psychologists
Like most psychological studies, it takes a small sample of american students and extrapolates the entire world's behaviour from that.
No wonder the "science" is so bad
The benefit of simulated system errors? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really get why clicking OK on something that vaguely looks like a system error is a problem. If it is a script running inside a web browser, the script cannot do anything that it wouldn't be able to do without the script. If it is already a process running inside the OS, it means that you are already in trouble because it could also erase files or install programs without you clicking OK.
It would be more beneficial to malware if they could make a REAL Windows dialog ("Install new software, Allow?") look like a harmless message ("Print job finished."), but that would be pretty tough to do.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Education is definitely not enough because people just don't care. They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along. There's little respect for the complexity of general purpose computers and any possible learning curve needed to use them properly.
My wife has occasionally complained that her computer was acting "strange". After hearing the symptoms I've often asked, "Did any messages appear?". "Yes." "Well what did it say?" "I don't know. I just clicked OK." She simply doesn't care enough to deal with an issue when she's trying to browse a web site or send an email.
My favorite was the time she complained my laptop must be broken because it turned itself off. I got nervous thinking it was broken. I asked if a message had popped up before it turned off. She said no, then thought about it and remembered something popped up a few minutes earlier. She couldn't remember what it said. I told her it said to plug it in or it would turn itself off. Her response: "Oops".
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:1, Insightful)
Computers are not for everybody!
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
In any way I think that the desktop environment can help, too. There should be defined popup styles for various events (crash, error, generic etc.), which should be impossible to recreate using simple images. GNOME/KDE kind of do this by allowing a multitude of styles, although users using something popular like the default Ubuntu look would still be possible targets. Vista-style blur effects might help, but are either too subtle or people simply don't notice. Maybe there could be some kind of authenticity indicator - a special mouse cursor used only for these popups (and inaccessible everywhere else) or an animation that plays when you mouse into the window. Of course those can be recreates using Flash...
Maybe the dialog should simply display something only the OS can know. The user could be asked to enter a certain phrase upon first boot (of a given profile) and that phrase is incorporated into the dialog - and of course completely inaccessible from everywhere else.
Of course I'm actually overthinking this; most people would still click malicious popups even if they only remotely looked like real windows at all.
Testing criteria (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing worth noting is whether the students were using their own computers or computers on loan from the department. It's worth noting because most people care what happens to their own personal systems (because they're the ones who will be stuck fixing them) but care less if a school computer is infected for instance.
I'm not sure if this makes them idiots or just uncaring, either way it could be relevant.
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:3, Insightful)
The attitude that users who do something wrong are idiots is a large part of why computers, operating systems and applications are generally pretty shit.
I enthusiastically agree. Over the last few years, I've had the "pleasure" of working with applications specific to healthcare and insurance industries. Overall, they're definitely shit.
I have to give Apple some credit here: activities requiring kernel access (or, for that matter, most anything that has a substantial potential for causing a security breach) are preceeded by a very friendly, clear message AND a requirement to enter a password before continuing.
The advantages here are clear:
1) The user actually gets honest-to-god informed about the effects of something they might agree to next and
2) Is slowed down (briefly) to ponder their action as they type in their password.
We can blame the user all we want, but anyone cognizant of human factors and ergonomic design knows that this is a paltry response...
Dialog boxes shut off critical thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Working in support, I have seen so many times where if an unfamiliar dialog box pops up, people either click on the option they are used to clicking on, or call support without even reading the message on the dialog box. It is like they are unable to physically see the contents of the dialog anymore, it has been beaten out of them. Often all I have to do is make them read me the dialog over the phone, which makes them process the info mentally, and they know which button they need to press then, having actually read and comprehended what was asked.
It is a very interesting problem, I think the solution is to make the buttons themselves say what they do, rather than clicking Ok or Cancel, have the button say "Exit crashed program", or "Install new program" or what have you. Always being OK or Cancel conditions people to just blindly click.
Jumping to incorrect conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe people should just realize they're using delicate instruments and should treat them as such. These aren't toys, but systems that cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to build. Its not the programmers' fault. Its the user's. If the user refuses to educate himself to not be a fool, there's really no way to try and make something foolproof.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
She couldn't remember what it said. I told her it said to plug it in or it would turn itself off. Her response: "Oops".
And you decided to spend the rest of your life with this woman, and mingle your genes with hers, and have her raise your children????
My wife is far from a technophile, but she's smart enough to know that pop-up windows transmit important information, and need to be answered correctly. (So, she calls me, and asks what to do.)
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers are not for everybody!
Amen, brother.
People aren't idiots, people are people. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the tools aren't working well for people then the design of the tool is wrong.
If you build a ATM (cash dispenser) that spits out the money before it returns the card then you'll find that a not insignificant number of people leave the machine without retrieving their card. In their brains the task they are doing (getting money) is complete so they walk away.
Thus cash machines return the card first and then give you your money.
You have to design things to work the way real people work. Calling people idiots is just a cop out.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
That kind of personality quirk is not necessarily a sign of genetic stupidity. It's just a sign of extreme disinterest.
There are people who treat their cars more or less the same way: they are not the least bit interested in what is going on, literally, "under the hood". Warning lights? Pffff. Unless it stops the car, interrupting their life, they don't give a crap.
Car dealers love them.
And frankly, while such people can be annoying, I find them infinitely preferable to type that treats people like inanimate objects.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course this is bad UI and the failure is ultimately that of the programmer."
I wonder what percentage of programmers double as UI designers. I be it's less than 25%. The reality is that by the time most programmers get their requirements, error scenarios often don't meet up with UI designers' assumptions. So then you're stuck with either popping a dialog, designing a different ham-fisted solution or going back to the designer and adding a lot of time to the development.
I'm not defending bad modal dialogues, but in complex software with heavy deadline pressure, programmers often have to make decisions they'd rather not. It's not a bad programmer, it's a bad process.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:3, Insightful)
Clever idea, but marketing would insist that the product ship with a default string and most users would never change it. Don't forget that this is an industry that ships security hardware with default passwords.
Microsoft has trained people to click "OK". (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has trained people to click "OK", "Open", "Run", "Install", "Continue", or whatever button (wherever it is) that gets you past the idiot box.
Apple had until recently avoided this mistake. NOT (as some people have said) by making the buttons more meaningful, but by simply NOT trying to use warning dialogs in place of good design.
For example, Mac OS doesn't ask you if you want to move a file to the trash, and it doesn't ask you if you want to empty the trash, because these are common actions, and the dialog box becomes something you reflexively accept.
Recently, as I say, Apple has started to deviate from the path of virtue. I've caught my Mac in bed with promiscuous dialogs on many occasions.
But by comparison with Windows (particularly Vista)... my Mac's still pretty much a dialog virgin. Really.
Re:Summary is WRONG (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been fighting that for decades.
If you users can't use it, it fails.
If your user doesn't understand it, it fail's.
If you complain that your users are idiots, you fail.
Why do they get ignored? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/gg109/splorpdotorg/whatwouldyoudo.jpg [photobucket.com]
(I left it onscreen until I rebooted -to be fair, this was Windows 98SE).
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
And frankly, while such people can be annoying, I find them infinitely preferable to type that treats people like inanimate objects.
I don't prefer either. And the two personality types are not mutually exclusive.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that doesn't make any sense. Logic fail.
If 90% of drivers crashed their cars, then yes, it would be the fault of the auto makers. Such is the situation with warning boxes. It is not the case that some small percentage of users screw them up, as is the case with drivers crashing their cars. Everybody fucks up warning boxes. Thus it is logical to conclude that they don't work, and that any programmer who relies on them to work is simply divorced from reality and not doing his job.
Re:The users aren't qualified to make these decisi (Score:4, Insightful)
> In short, in two or three generations when all the people who don't know basic computer
> security and operation have died, and not being able to spot a phishing scam will be
> looked upon much the same way that being illiterate is now, then the problem will have
> fixed itself.
It would appear that you believe that all of those who "grew up with computers" know basic computer security and operation. This is just as true as it is that all of those who "grew up with books" are able to read and understand James Joyce.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:2, Insightful)
That's still a failing of the programmer. In the case of a large project like that, "the programmer" is just shorthand for anyone responsible for creating the project. Point being, a confirmation dialog that users constantly screw up is the fault of whoever created it, not the fault of the user.
And yet the clueless-nerd-squad was up in arms when Firefox made it *really hard* to accidentally hit "OK" and wind up trusting a totally bogus SSL certificate. Something that people do *ALL THE TIME*. I've watched my wife do it. Repeatedly. Telling her to not hit "OK" just gets her annoyed at me *AND* the dialogs.
Seems like the only solution is to take away the dialogs. You want to do something dangerous, you'll need to enter the launch codes, and insert and turn both keys simultaneously. At that point, it won't be in anyone's interest to -require- users to do insecure things (such as trust a signed Java applet, an ActiveX control, or a bad SSL cert).
Re:Newsflash! (Score:4, Insightful)
To the late great Carlin.
Think of how dumb the average person is, and realize half of them are dumber than that
Everytime I think about that I laugh...and die a little inside.
What's funny, or sad depending on how you look at it, is that half of the people aren't dumber than the average person. It's not the average where half are under and half over, the median [wikipedia.org] is the point where half are over and half under.
Falcon
Re:The actual text (Score:5, Insightful)
The "read" version is definitely more common, though, for some reason.
Most computers spend more time reading than writing. I know this is insanely simple, but that is why you see more read errors.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Education is definitely not enough because people just don't care. They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along. There's little respect for the complexity of general purpose computers and any possible learning curve needed to use them properly."
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this expectation.
Until you have internalized this, you won't be able to design great software.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:3, Insightful)
I would argue that this study demonstrates that users are conditioned to dismiss such popups because this doesn't make any sense to them:
"The instruction at '0x77f41d24 referenced memory at '0x595c2a4c.' The memory could not be 'read.' Click OK to terminate program."
One could also argue that this proves the standard OS prompts can be duplicated closely enough to fool users online into performing bad operations.
Re:The actual text (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is the dialog in question [arstechnica.com], then I think even I would have clicked 'Ok', and I'm paranoid as all get out. (Which is why I use Firefox so perhaps I'm not so familiar with IE look and feel).
I mean it's not like you have a lot of options is it? Crash out of IE? And just looking at the still image, other than the minimise/maximise controls, there's nothing that screams 'malware' to me. Even the presence of the maximise controls doesn't immediately grab me, because Microsoft changes GUI schemes and widget sets so often (Office 2007, ahem) that it's really hard to tell what a 'typical' dialog should or shouldn't look like.
Isn't the real question: if you're always only ever ONE 'OK' BUTTON CLICK from hosing your computer and giving up all control to an attacker - isn't something very wrong already?
Re:The users aren't qualified to make these decisi (Score:3, Insightful)
I grew up surrounded with books and I can't stand James Joyce.
Possibly the same reason why people who grew up with Unix can't stand Windows... :)
Re:The actual text (Score:3, Insightful)
That dialog has a few things wrong with it. The most damning is the status bar on the bottom (which, admittedly, wasn't on all the fake dialogs), but more obvious would be that your mouse turns into a hand on the dialog/okay button, or that there are minimize/maximize buttons.
The other option is to click the "x" in the top right, and it's something you should do when unexpected windows pop up while web browsing. Even if it's possibly a legit error, there's no harm in hitting "x" instead of "OK".
I don't think your comment about switching GUI schemes and widgets so often is correct, especially since you pointed to a piece of software that had almost no scheme/widget changes for 12 years before getting a complete makeover. The fact is, windows had a very consistent look and feel from 95 through 2000, and xp/vista/W7 (screenshots that have been released, I cannot comment on internal look and feel, as that is always subject to change) only had slight modifications to what is still a relatively consistent GUI.
As for the "one OK button click away" - that depends if the relevant link was simply an ad-farm link or if it used a known exploit to silently install software. If the latter, then a patch should be issued, but it's something that can happen to any piece of sufficiently advanced (read: complex) software.
Re:NOT: (was Re:Summary is WRONG) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
I just don't get it.
Some people, as soon as a computer (or something else they've convinced themselves is a magic black box) enters the picture, turn off every shred of intelligence and common sense they ever had. There's simply no excuse for it, in my experience. These people aren't just ignorant, they refuse to try, because they've already convinced themselves that they can't understand $thing.
A car analogy applies well to me personally (and is obligatory on this site). I don't know cars that well. I can change my oil, and filter, and that's it. I don't pretend I understand cars, either, but I know what normal operating parameters for my car are, and when it starts acting weird, I can give a mechanic a decent description of what's going wrong. This is because even though I know I'm ignorant of how the car works, I pay fucking attention, and remember that it's just a machine like any other, and there's a cause for what's going wrong. Probably a very logical one, too!
Others can't be bothered to use the shred of intelligence required to do this. They're the kind of people who make me want to get a law passed making it legal to shoot stupid people. That, or reproduce as much as possible, so I can have smart kids, and do my part to help keep the morons from overrunning the earth.
Re:The actual text (Score:1, Insightful)
Ooh pwease mister, don't say that Windows error messages are common! That would be tewwible! Ye gods, the MS supporters might even be
You can always take up the party line and blame it on bad memory or low-quality third-party drivers. I notice that the "bad memory" excuse has become less popular lately. That's probably because I've personally used linux on unmodified machines that some MCSE declared to have bad memory and decided that either Linux can fix defective hardware or the memory wasn't why Windows was (relatively) unstable. I doubt I'm the only person who ever tried this. Of course you could always run a goddamned boot CD with memtest86 on it to rule this out but that's not as fun and won't be much faster.
That leaves faulty/low-quality third-party drivers, which is what I hear the most from Windows (Windows, not necessarily Microsoft) apologists when talking reasonably about this subject. This is a more perfect excuse since there are many third-party drivers for Windows that come from different sources, all or nearly all of them are closed-source, and if you fixed such a machine by modifying only a driver there is still no assurance that you fixed the actual flaw and did not merely replace a driver which reveals or exposes a bug with a driver that does not reveal or expose a bug. So the claim is completely unverifiable/unfalsifiable and is only credible if you grant the assumption that Microsoft always/very often produces relatively high-quality software and so the flaw is likely to be "the other guy", an unnamed third-party vendor among many third-party vendors.
That there are many third-party drivers and some truly are low-quality makes it more believable that third-party drivers are why Windows is generally less stable than a *nix platform, but this too relies on an assumption. There are multiple events that can cause Windows to crash. The assumption is that this single problem is more common than the others, that it is less preventable (good design) or more difficult to mitigate (i.e. with patches/updates) than all of the rest. If this were all I had to stand on, I would not confidently assert that I knew what the cause of the instability is and that the cause implies that it's not really Microsoft's fault. I might say that in a hopeful manner, if I believed or wanted it to be true, but that alone is not fact; stating it as such is dishonest if intentional and delusional if done out of ignorance.
Linux is no different (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at your log file sometime. Full of useless crap that buries the good stuff. You've got 75% of your log full of stupid failed SSH attempts from script kiddies, 10% from "hi, I'm named and my log level is not perfect so I'm going to tell you that somebody looked for pornjunction.com and I couldn't find it". 10% for "errors" in daemons, only they aren't really errors. Then you've got 4% from some fucked up cron job. That leaves like 1% for the truely useful error message that might actually be of value.
My point? Linux, FreeBSD or any other unix OS has just as many inexplicable, frequent error messages, only instead of dialog boxes, they pollute your log files instead.
PS: The event log is no different.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:3, Insightful)
The sad part is that it's a real-life case :(
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
So... How goes the hunt then, friend?
Hunt's long over. Been married to a wonderful woman for 10 years, and have two great children.
Re:NOT: (was Re:Summary is WRONG) (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a suggestion for everyone. Whenever you display an error message, don't just display the error message. The user (normally) doesn't particularly care what went wrong. They just want to know how to fix it.
Eg, I was trying to buy an AudioBook on iTunes the other day, when it said to me "Users in Australia cannot purchase tracks on the UK site". Now it didn't tell me "well, go to the Australian site, and here's a link to go to it" or say "would you like to go to the Australian site?". It just gave me a dumb error message. It took me ten minutes to find the link to the Australian site (scroll down to the bottom of the front page, dur. Seems so obvious now).
Dammit, be helpful to your users. Don't just display the error message. Display what to do about it. Even "please try again later" is better than nothing.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can understand this, but what still amazes is me is that people deduce that because the error message doesn't mean squat to them, that it doesn't mean anything to anyone, so they don't even write it down, and then they expect someone like me, later on, and even over the phone, to tell them what it meant!
I'm generalising horribly here, but please bear with me.
You would not believe the number of people who basically judge everyone based on themselves. It's like a slightly more sophisticated equivalent of a small child deciding that if they can't see you, you can't see them and so they can make themselves invisible by closing their eyes.
Re:Jumping to incorrect conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
As my girlfriend is a forth year vet student at one of the top 5 schools in the nation, I've got some experience with your customer (future) base and I'm the head developer for a small development firm. I feel I can help you out a little.
Most vets are idiots. Most of them have good memories and that gets them through vet school and past the boards. Very few of them actually have critical thinking skills and are people I would actually let touch my animal. Put them in front of a case that isn't in the text book and they have no clue what to do, even on simple stuff.
Example: They use IV Pumps to push certain fluids or drugs into the animals at times because you don't want to push the whole large dosage in at one time. Simply enough. So when they don't have a pump available, many of them never consider the fact that a gravity feed will accomplish the same thing, so they 'cant give the animal its medicine'. I'm not a doctor, but I've seen this happen and literally had to ask 'why don't you just let it drip in like before you had pumps'. After they get over themselves and have told me how utterly wrong I was, I've returned to see the animal on a IV drip. No ability to think on their own, just an ability to repeat something they've memorized. True story.
Not all of them are that way, I'd say about 10-15 out of her class of 75 can actually deal with a situation they haven't specifically been in before, the rest would be worthless in an emergancy situation with a problem they've never seen before.
This turned into more of a rant about vet students than intended, but for fucks sake for what is supposed to be the hardest branch of medicine, 'more difficult to get into the human medicine', at a top 5 school ... a lot of these students (AND professors) are really worthless.
So I say, your challenge is impossible to complete for the majority of people. Its not just Vets that are idiots, its all people. A small group of intelligent people carry the rest of the normal people forward.
Re:Study confirms most popups are idiotic (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a terrible idea. How are you going to search for the error code/message if it just says "$APPNAME has crashed due to a bug."?
It should at least have a details button, not some line that you have to change in a config file.
Re:Even more importantly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there's a lesson in there: alert dialogs are a idiotic solution to a real problem. Users don't care about them while a task is being performed (they effectively send them to /dev/null), just when the task ends in an undesired way.
So the lesson is: log all those unread dialogs and provide a diagnosis tool where the user can read them all after the task has finished, i.e. when the user will care about what they said. Why is it that computers have log files aimed to developers, but not ones aimed to log in a friendly way the events aimed to end users? Is there really so little empathy in the programmers mindset?
Re:Children (Score:3, Insightful)
No, we should expect better from computers.
Nintendo has very smart HID people working for them, who can actually design an interface that is so dead easy to use, someone like the little girl you describe can do it. And old, half-blind people can do it, too. Which means everyone can do it.
Meanwhile, your average windos installation is "useable" only by techies or those daring enough to play one at their own risk.
Re:The actual text (Score:3, Insightful)
This didn't pop up on their personal computers, they were in a computer lab, and they thought they were supposed to be looking at medical information. I doubt you change the skin on every computer you sit down at.