Average User Ingenuity

As originally posted on Cohost

IIRC a UX research project at Mozilla once found that the average user doesn't know a lot of tools but excels at combining what they do know

I'm paraphrasing something told to me like 8 years ago so don't quote me on this but it was sometime around when we started working on the in-browser screenshot tool, and they did a bunch of qualitative interviews and surveys and found that it's actually fairly common for users to:

• Not know that their computer can take a screenshot or even what a screenshot is.
• Know that they can print a webpage.
• Know that they can scan things and get an image of them.
• Know that they can email files and download the attachments on another computer.
• When faced with a problem that requires getting a screenshot of a webpage, instead of thinking "is this something that can be done easily / should I search how to do this", they will instead combine the things they already know how to do to accomplish the goal, e.g. print the webpage out, scan it back in to a different computer that the scanner is hooked up to, and email the scanned document to themselves so they can retrieve it on the original computer.

I wish I could remember the more surprising examples, but the point was that, at least based on what that particular study saw, the average user is far more ingenious than you'd think, but they lack a large body of knowledge to apply that ingenuity to. And if they can come up with a way to do a task using what they know already, they're more likely not to consider looking up if there's an easier way since they already consider it solved.

I don't remember how I learned about taking screenshots but the first way I learned was the PrintScreen key. And once I knew that, it was how I always took screenshots until I was lucky enough to witness someone using Cmd+Shift+4 on MacOS and asked what they had just done; otherwise I had no reason to look up if there was a better way.

Hearing this shifted my thinking on what users are capable of to view it less as a competence issue and more of a knowledge issue.