The User Skills of Average Joe - Worse Than You Think

When producing software it is expected to receive support queries and issue reports from the user base. It is surprising just how many of these turn out to be questions about how to achieve something within your application. However, if you look into this a little deeper, it should not be *that* surprising that our users find something difficult that we, as IT professionals, may consider easy. A survey of developed countries found that the majority of people are unable to complete medium-complexity tasks, and only a small percentage of the population has high level computer-related abilities. This is something we all need to take into account when building software. But it can’t be all that bad, can it? This talk will show a summary of the results of the survey, along with some key points, to help people visualise the ability levels of the average user.