Just Remember Even Your Smart Users are Dumb

Plurk has been getting a lot of coverage lately due to Twitter’s increasing outages and disabled services. Plurk offers an interesting alternative to Twitter with a lot of different features.

The problem? I can’t see the timeline. I have to use this picture from Kyle over at LostInTechnology to illustrate what I’m missing:

plurk-timeline.png

Now, I’m fairly tech and internet saavy. I taught my dad how to delete his text messages last week without ever consulting a cellphone handbook. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why there’s a blue empty space despite the fact that I have friends and I’m updating Plurk.

To further my frustration, there’s no “contact us” or “help” or “FAQ” easy to find. Given my ADD, multitasking and “oh shiny!” frame of mind when it comes to social media, I moved on fairly quickly.

I tried again with a client, but the only one available is for Firefox’s sidebar (and those always bug me).

So will I plurk again? Possibly, but the “dumbness” of a user who is new to your site wasn’t taken into account once the account was set up. Plurk had a very easy registration process that walked me through everything, but then it dumped me into this environment without a lot of support and I painted myself into a corner.

What can we learn from this? No matter how smart people are, or saavy, you need to make it clear how they can get help when they get stuck. If I got stuck, imagine someone who hasn’t used Twitter or any other service!

The same goes for blogs and podcasts. You may think it’s very easy for saavy people to find your contact info or to subscribe to your content, but you need to make it so simple a three year old can do it. Not because people are dumb, but because smart people can be dumb. If it’s not clear I’m more likely to say, “forget it,” and move on.

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June 10, 2008 | Filed Under Plurk, social media users, twitter

2 Comments 

Comments

2 Responses to “Just Remember Even Your Smart Users are Dumb”

  1. Jessica on June 10th, 2008 10:41 am

    A friend of mine put it quite well – in regards to the no FAQ / About / Contact on Plurk –
    He questioned: “Who the (heck) is Plurk!”

    Can’t get into it, too graphically annoying!

  2. worldofhiglet on June 10th, 2008 6:04 pm

    Well, being the sheep I am I signed up…and it’s left me slightly bemused. There is an FAQ right at the bottom of the screen but I don’t really like the timeline. Maybe if I had lots of Plurk buddies it would be better but I’m not holding my breath…

    Plus I really don’t like the name Plurk – it’s (Pl)irksome!

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