[maccard]

I do a decent amount of ux work and probably fall into category 1 here. The problem isn’t “we don’t want to spend money on support”, the problem is “people really do need to be babysat for a lot of things, and no matter what you do, they will not read the documentation.

[TeMPOraL]

That's fair. People really are like that. This is suboptimal, and I emphasize with both frustrated devs and PHBs worried about escalating support costs. The reasons behind why users are like this are complex, but "users are stupid" isn't one of them.

[maccard]

I think "users are not paying attention" is a friendlier way to describe it.

A while back, I was supporting an e-sports event. We had professionals, competing for an awful lot of money who were deeply familiar with the game. We had taken mobile phones, etc from them so no distractions.

They were briefed before hand that all they had to do was wait until they were given the green light, and click the big OK button on their screen to enter the game. We added a giant modal with the OK that explained "press this button when you are told to". This was a last minute workaround for the fact that we could only tell how many people were in the queue for something, but not which of our expected players were not in the queue. Our telemetry tells us one person is missing, so we have to go walking around to find them. Found the guy, sitting in front of a giant modal saying "Click this when you are told to", and his response was "I didn't know I was supposed to click it".

Now add mobile phones, children, doorbells, cooking, neighbours, and this becomes widespread.

[rcxdude]

It's a decent approximation, if you remember it's an approximation for "the user is tired/stressed/not paying attention/doesn't actually want to deal with your app". I remember a talk which suggested "The user is drunk" as a better approximation, because it's more obviously not literally true.