Learned an important lesson during a visit with my cousin (hi cuz!). As the family’s Resident Geek™, I spent some time updating and streamlining the house MacBook. He was trying to show me a video, and then pointed to a dialog box that had popped up, saying he needed to update his version of Flash. Let me paraphrase what he said:

It keeps saying my “Flash Player” is old, and so I clicked to update, but it just downloaded some file and nothing happened. I eventually double-clicked on the file it downloaded, but it says something about “closing all my browsers” before I can upgrade. What are browsers?

It’s an important point that can’t be stressed often enough: most people are not computer geeks! It’s really hard for geeks to design things that can be useful to actual regular humans. You’d think that a huge company like Adobe would have figured that out by now – and that they’d have some real user testing in place to catch things like the needlessly complex Flash upgrade process.

Geeks use jargon like it’s going out of style. Technical writers, user experience specialists, and product testers are essential, but apparently, they too can be corrupted by geekdom.

I could probably make a million bucks by starting a software testing firm staffed almost entirely by mothers-in-law working on Win98 machines and gigantic candy-colored CRT iMac desktops.