[gbog]

Always the same argument, and still wrong. It depends 100% on the desirability of the expected result. I have seen a non-IT guy do an incredibly complex serie of super user operations on his PC just to install CS. He was very motivated. But if you asked him to install Chrome in place of IE he would even understand what it meant.

Same: many people still use peer-to-peer software to download movies, mostly porn. I guess it is better now but for a long time you had to do some port forwarding -- yes, port forwarding -- on your home router to get bearable download speed. Nowadays it still seem very difficult to get the proper non English subtitles for movies, but it is very attractive so people do it despite all the "steps".

So, please, let's stop this "Family memebers are below-two-clicks stupid" mantra. It is false. The truths is: they usually do not care enough for the second click. When they do care enough, typing a command line is very feasible.

[mozumder]

OK then you definitely haven't met my family members, who routinely can't log in because they have the caps-lock on.

[madez]

He is saying that they can't login when the caps-lock is on because they don't care enough. I think he is right. Even old people are able to do complex stuff, but only if they care.

[chriswarbo]

I agree. I think it's important to keep track of who cares about the user's task too. As you say, if the user cares about a task, they'll jump through many hoops to get it done. Especially when money is involved (e.g. finding cracked copy of XYZ to avoid paying license fee)

When someone else wants the user to do a task, e.g. a business wants users to install and use its software, then it's definitely better to assume that users will give up at minor annoyances or complications. Again, especially when money is involved; i.e. it should be as easy as possible for people to give you money.

[JustSomeNobody]

I think this nails it.

They want to learn email? They do.

They want to learn to use FaceBook? They do.

If they really wanted to learn to download YouTube videos (Ideally using youtube-dl), they would.

[jmnicolas]

> I guess it is better now but for a long time you had to do some port forwarding

Nothing has changed for me. Did I miss something ?

[KMag]

Back when I was at LimeWire, circa 2005, we attempted to use UPnP to have LW configure port forwarding for you. Though, maybe some router vendors consider UPnP a security risk these days.