Discussing user knowledge

The following incidents, supposedly reported by technical support assistants, demonstrate extreme (and humorous) cases of users not having needed knowledge to complete some task. Yet, by discussing what knowledge they are missing, we learn that even the "easiest" tasks require some background knowledge or information.

For each of these incidents, discuss what knowledge users are missing that led to their problem. In some cases, they are not so much missing knowledge but are applying knowledge from other domains.

• "This program says it has performed an Illegal action and will be shut down, but I'm not doing anthing illegal!"
• One customer had thousands of documents on the desktop. When told to 'trash' the documents, the customer dragged the trash can/recycling bin on top of each document's icon expecting it to disappear.
• One customer was instructed to click the start button (W95). She couldn't find it and was told to go to the bottom left corner of her screen. After a few trys she said, "Okay, now the monitor is black. What do i do?" She was pushing the power button for the monitor.
• "Will my telephone ring when I have E-mail?"
• "Can you help me? My E-mail is stuck in the phone line . . ."
• When asked which part of his new computer wasn't working properly, one customer said "the coffeecup holder". The technician insisted that the computer didn't come with a coffeecup holder, but the customer insisted that it did and now the holder was broken. It turned out that he was talking about the CD-drive, on which he had been putting his coffee cup.
• One customer came into a technical support center with a box of disks and said: "Hi, I want to download the internet. Can you help me?"
• "Your software doesn't work and it should. I haven't touched it since before I reformatted my hard drive and it was working then!"

These incidents were quoted from the Web site at "http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/5842/" on Monday January 10, 2002.