Web Designers Suck at the Big Picture
A recent PEW Study says 21% of people in the United States of America don’t use the Internet. If you’re a web designer that 21% should toll an ominous bell from the old church on the hill – because we’re talking 64,471,375 people.
That’s right, a whopping 64 and a half million people in the US don’t use the Internet for anything… not even email. That’s 64 million people who more than likely don’t understand the double-click or the idea of hyperlinks or even the navigational significance of using the back button as an escape pod when you find yourself up to your living eyeballs in website crap.
A recent article on Web Axe elicited sarcasm from me several days ago when they wrote that people need to be retrained to use the Internet. Seriously? In the US alone you would need to retrain over 242 million existing practitioners who may or most likely don’t visit your website – PLUS you’ve got to up-skill the unwashed poor of 64 million who have the idea that a mouse belongs in a field.
Excuse my obvious sarcasm, it’s tempting to use em tags to highlight my perverted sense of misdirection on this matter.
Fundamentally web designers suffer from attribution error caused by over-exposure to the Internet. We believe that everyone is online and everyone understands certain metaphors and UI designs… and we believe this because our exposure is saturated with the fuel to support our views. Thus, attribution error is fed through confirmation bias and we come up with a GIGO (Garbage In / Garbage Out) hypothesis – that everyone are just like web designers.
Nothing which we can do in this world will alter the existence of unsophisticated website visitors. Unless, of course, you get right out of the business and stop trying. But what we have to keep in perspective is that our job isn’t to dictate to any-and-all the terms of our relationship…
… Our relationship being that we work for clients to improve their ROI through the brand experienced by their customers…
So stop doing that. Stop demanding and start using finesse to understand the problem. If you’re not sure about the problem here is a clue… 21% of the people in the US don’t access the Internet. Your job just got harder.
