I think that this video does not by any means mean that people are stupid, it just means they have other things on their minds that are more important to them. Who’s fault is it really that the general public doesn’t know the difference? Is there really any fault to pass out?

To be quite honest; to say such a thing, I find, is both ignorant and arrogant…

Also, would we be as shocked had it started with, “Hi. I’m Scott from the National Zoo and we’re here to find out what is an ungulate?”

Kind of already knew the answer.

terrible argument to make — those two things are not mutually exclusive. They’re not even in the same realm of consideration.

We tend to assume everyone who uses the web cares about IE 6, or the FireFox market share, or if you should or shouldn’t use Safari. Most of us in the room today are “the friend who come over and delete all the other browsers and say: use this now.”

We’re dealing with very technical details when developing a website, but much less technical than developing other types of software. Adobe InDesign doesn’t come with a printed manual for PostScript page description language, for instance. Why do we try to insist that our clients know the difference between AJAX/CSS/ASP/WHATEVS, when they just want the website to work.

How can we build better websites, be better service providers, and get over ourselves during the process?

But yeah, I’m not that surprised. My whole family calls me for tech questions and if I try to walk them through something, I end up having to explain what things like “browsers,” “ftp clients,” “urls,” etc are.

I suggest it is only when talking to someone in technology – eg.g the help desk. I can imagine the following:

User, “I can’t get to CNN.”
Help Desk: “Please open your browser and…”
User: “Please open my what and do what?”

Much better if the help desk were to ask, “What program do you use to get to CNN normally?” Is that technically right… No, but the goal is not to be right, the goal is to have a happy user.

For those of us that remember real, live travel agents, I am sure you can remember the agent saying something like, “My computer is very slow today.” In reality their computer was just a terminal, but they assumed that it was capable of more.

We would do well to remember that.

People don’t know what browser is let alone what version but they all used the web, and seem probably do so just fine without knowing what browser they use.

In a world of validated codes and meticulous design details, it’s humbling to be reminded that (some) people interacting with the technology/design don’t care.

They just want it to work.
(…’least that’s what *I* got out of it)