learnandteachonline.com

Couple days ago, Dave Winer made friends with a bunch of women by saying he was tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something.

In Philadelphia (the movie), the Denzel Washington character said "Explain it to me like I'm a 4-year-old." That might be a substitute for using "your mother" as the lowest common denominator user.

Anyway, sometimes I think too much is made of dumbing things down. It may not be just women of a certain age who are not respected by some confident young purveyors of technology tools. If they're thinking "we have to make this idiot-proof," aren't they thinking that their audience is the hoi polloi, the great unwashed?

I've been around that attitude in companies and organizations, and it makes me uncomfortable to hear employees disrespecting customers -- the source of their income, and their ultimate boss. I worry that the attitude may subsciously creep into dealings with customers or tend to dictate disrespectful strategies in approaches to them.

People will rise to the level of expectations of them. You shouldn't drag the majority down to the level of the least aware. It's insulting.

Here's a post from almost a year ago that tells about dumbing down instructions on the web.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write carefully, and you shouldn't make things as clear as they can be. But too often you get one or two complaints and you are tempted to change things to make sure everybody gets it.

Take the person in the linked post who was all up in arms on receiving a mailing list subscription confirmation. She thought I was trying to trick her into buying a magazine subscription. In the end there were more than 2,000 people on that list of community planners of local National Safety Month events. I should use this one paranoid, irritated user as the model for dealing with all the others? I don't think so!