Osmose

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

September 10, 2024 mozilla

As originally posted on Cohost

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:

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.