So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.

No.

It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.

but what if they're right? 🤔
That maybe software in general is really user unfriendly, too complicated and not well thought out? And this situation is your chance to learn from them?

@heyheni I totally agree. You need to make your software idiot-proof.

I totally understand where you are coming from. I made b2b accounting software with a standard login screen. It was literally a text input for username/password and a "login" button.

One of the clients was an old lady and called me because she was having troubling logging in. After nearly an hour on the phone and checking logs, I finally realized she was entering her username and password but instead of clicking "login", she would click the link "forgot password". And then fill in the info needed to reset her password and get emailed a new one. Then go back to the main login page where this repeated 34 times.

I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe a trained accountant whos job requires her interact and use computers, couldn't figure out a standard login page.

In my experience there really is no such thing as idiot proofing. The end user might be competent, or they might also be an old batty lady who even after 20 years of using computers daily can't figure out a standard login screen

@heyheni

Fortunately, 90% of people don't have any issues with it. The 10% though - oh boy.