Few years back in was in a parking garage and the lady in front on me kept pressing on the screen to get her ticket, with increasing power and frustration. It wasn't a touch screen. There were buttons on the side.
That's probably as good of an example of mismatched expectations in UI paradigms as I've ever seen. The buttons are pretty common, pretty obvious, and intuitive, but because the expectations were so different she just missed it.
Something similar sometimes happens with drivers not expecting cyclists: they will look to the left to see if something is coming, but their attention is geared towards "is there a car there?" and they will completely miss the cyclist or pedestrian right there in front view. The famous "people completely fail to see the person in gorilla costume" is another famous example of this.
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I once ran a computer course for older people in the local community centre. This was over 20 years ago when (usually older) computer illiterate people were a bit more common (they still exist, but it's much rarer), and I found very little was "intuitive" for many of them. Windows showing a popup? Or even the taskbar in general? Yeah, good luck trying to explain window management.
> A moron in a hurry is a phrase that has been used in legal cases, especially in the UK, involving trademark infringement and passing off. Where one party alleges that another (the defendant) has infringed their intellectual property rights by offering for sale a product that is confusably similar to their own, the court has to decide whether a reasonable person would be misled by the defendant's trademark or the get-up of their product. It has been held that "if only a moron in a hurry would be misled" the case is not made out.
In this context, yes, some UIs have to be usable by a moron in a hurry. Fire alarm? Gotta make it easy to use even if you get the occasional dipshit who pulls it for fun, because the alternative is tragic. That's why doors in public buildings have crash bars, the bars that go across the door that open it when someone crashes into them, because you have to assume eventually there will be a crowd of idiots in a hurry trying desperately to escape, and the crowd crush must open the door because otherwise it will kill people.
That's probably as good of an example of mismatched expectations in UI paradigms as I've ever seen. The buttons are pretty common, pretty obvious, and intuitive, but because the expectations were so different she just missed it.
Something similar sometimes happens with drivers not expecting cyclists: they will look to the left to see if something is coming, but their attention is geared towards "is there a car there?" and they will completely miss the cyclist or pedestrian right there in front view. The famous "people completely fail to see the person in gorilla costume" is another famous example of this.
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I once ran a computer course for older people in the local community centre. This was over 20 years ago when (usually older) computer illiterate people were a bit more common (they still exist, but it's much rarer), and I found very little was "intuitive" for many of them. Windows showing a popup? Or even the taskbar in general? Yeah, good luck trying to explain window management.