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 an inappropriate mental model.

• "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.
• 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!"
• AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.
• Another Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.
• An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

These incidents were quoted from the Web site at "http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/5842/" on January 10, 2002 and from http://sites.google.com/site/loveshoby/funny-technical-questions on March 30, 2011.