As part of a personal goal I’ve been spending alot more time doing user support than I have in the past, and I’ve noticed that people are pretty much now conditioned to defend themselves when asking for help. It’s not that there isn’t a good supply of help out there, it can just be hard to find. And if you do find help sometimes it’s hard to get past people’s Usenetisms, so much so that users have become accustomed to preparing their questions for the incoming onslaught.
Here are some examples from questions I’ve seen recently.
- “I’m new to Linux/Ubuntu”
What the user really means: “Don’t flame me because this is a stupid question and please don’t confuse me.” I’d like to think we help people who provide information so that we can help them without ridicule, and it’s nice to see answers like this that help illustrate things to people more usefully than copying and pasting commands people aren’t going understand anyways. I suspect this will always be a challenge for us though. And you’re always going to have a subset of people that think that it’s totally normal for people to have to learn vim to use their computer, but I’m not thinking of anyone in particlar (Rick Harding from Michigan).
One thing I noticed we also suck at:
- “I’m sorry if this has been asked before.”
This is my favorite. Our old school culture of newsgroup eliteism is so ingrained that we defend stupid software at the expense of the user experience. We expect people to search but the forum search is rate limited because it can’t handle more than a certain number of searches (what?!). And our mailing lists don’t have any search infrastructure at all! Well, this is why we have Google right? Well, when was the last time you searched for something and you got back a post from lists.ubuntu.com? Rare indeed, though you surely won’t have a problem getting back scraped content from our mailing lists with a bunch of worthless ads on the page. Would I trust information from a page like that?
Come to think of it, why are we even using mailing lists for any kind of user support? You can’t fix or edit any of the posts, it has no search mojo, so why are we wasting our time with it? (It’s 2012!)
The only user support software I see that is even trying to fix this problem is Stack Exchange, but even then, in the case where submitting duplicate content actually improves the user experience, people still always reply with “Did you try a search?”, and of course, as much as people try, it’s really hard to do search right, the internal Ask Ubuntu search still isn’t as useful as doing “foo site:askubuntu.com” in Google. Still though, at least it’s not reinforcing the same old model from newsgroups that content is immutable and never fixable.
Try this: The next time you want to reply to someone with “Have you tried a search?” I want you to open up a browser and go into privacy mode, and then do a search for those terms and then look at the quality of the results and then have a think. Maybe there’s a reason that the person is so lost in the first place. Maybe we should be thinking about ways to be smarter about the tools we’re using for support.