Don’t Blame The User, Blame The Editor

I swear, some days you just want to reach into the screen and strangle the blogger on the other end. Jeff Atwood complains that his users commonly fail to read all the helpful hints on how to use their overly complicated, what you see isn’t what you get editor on Stack Overflow:

The ask question page is already dangerously close to cluttered with helpful tips, but apparently these helpful buttons, links, and text are all but invisible to a large segment of the user population. Sure, you could argue that Super User tends to attract less sophisticated users, but I see the exact same problem with programmers on Stack Overflow. As new users, a significant percentage of them can’t figure out how to format code, even though there’s not only a toolbar button that does it for you, but help text on the right explicitly describing how to do it manually. (Just indent 4 spaces. Spoiler alert!) So essentially, users don’t find the editor intuitive and the solution they’ve gone with up until now is to add more and more help text to try and teach the user how to use the unintuitive editor. It’s not working. The obvious solution is to escalate the arms race:

More and more, I’m thinking we need to put the formatting help — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. That is, pre-populate the question entry area with some example formatting that is typical of the average question. Nothing complicated. But at least then it’d be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin’ faces. Thankfully the comments are full of people suggesting the right answer – fix the editor so you don’t need instructions to use it. You can always provide a source view for geeks who like to type in markup, but make the default something that just works.

If the mark of a poor tradesman is that they always blames their tools, the mark of a bad UI designer is that they always blame the users. It’s not them, it’s you.