They don’t know what we know…

The other day I read an article titled “90% of your users are idiots“. I shared it to Twitter and had a few lively conversations on the subject. All in all we decided that users weren’t idiots per se, but rather were otherwise intelligent people who didn’t work in our field.

Every day in my business I spew acronyms like they’re primary colors and on more than one occasion I’ve completely stumped my wife with a word that is second nature to me, but a different language to her.

So, with this in mind, are we perhaps failing our users with our designs?

I’m currently in the process of a cart & checkout re-design at work. Needless to say there’s been a lot of conversation on the topic as well as testing (not as much as I’d like, but here we are). It’s going well, but it’s still not “there”. I’ve no doubt that it will do what we want, and better than our current implementation, but could it be even better?

Maybe some subtle changes to the wording might make a huge difference.

This came to me while talking to my wife (my always patient sounding board) and in the course of the conversation I used the word “checkout”. She paused, asked what I meant by it, and once I explained we were good to go.

But…

There was a pause there. She interrupted me to ask what I meant by that. When we design interfaces our users don’t have that luxury, so they just go somewhere else.

Cut to the chase…We are prominently using a button labeled “Continue Checkout” in this design. I wonder how many other users don’t get that the way we do?

I bet we’ll find some very interesting results if we change it to simply “Next”.

Will report.