Study Reveals End Users Don’t Pay Attention

      by Wyatt Walter

A study done by the Psychology Department at North Carolina State University released today shows something we already knew: end users don’t care about technology. The study assigned tasks to be performed using Flash applications to several college students. During the tasks, the users were presented with four pop-up dialogs inside Internet Explorer. The first pop-up was a legitimate application pop-up and the rest were browser windows displaying an image made to look like a real dialog, each more obviously fake than the previous. Sadly enough, 23 of the 42 participants clicked the ‘OK’ button on the dialog that didn’t even take away the IE status bar at the bottom of the page.

Fake Pop-up

When questioned afterwards, the researchers also came to the same conclusion any technical support or systems administrator would have told you: the users viewed the dialog boxes as distractions from achieving the task at hand. Fortunately, usability has gotten much better in the last few years, but users still don’t read errors unless educated about implications of ignoring them. Obviously raising awareness about viruses and other dangers online is not enough. Also, I’m guessing that a lot of people depend upon their security software installed on their PC to make it idiot-proof. Of course this study ‘reveals’ a problem that IT professionals have known about for years, but have end users become numb to the feedback they are receiving from their machines?

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 23rd, 2008

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