This morning I read an article which suggested that many user complaints could be complicated by confusion (try saying that five times fast). Often, the problem isn’t stupid users, it’s that they don’t understand the terminology to communicate their problem. It’s up to us, as computer support officers, or technicians, or engineers, or customer service representatives, or whatever we call ourselves, to interpret what the user is saying, and articulate the issue in a way that is both useful to us, and comprehensible for them.

Imagine you hurt your leg while playing football; when you went to the doctor, would you say, “Doctor, I have a lesion on my anterior cruciate ligament“, or “Doctor, I hurt my knee, it really hurts, ow, ow, ow!” ? You cannot be expected to diagnose your problem and express it in the correct medical language, and you must allow your users the same courtesy. This afternoon, I had an experience with a user that utterly baffled me, because she didn’t communicate her problem in a way that made sense to me. This wasn’t her fault, but I was left feeling as if she and I were speaking completely different languages.

Most of the users I deal with are studying to be, or qualified as, nurses or doctors, and whilst I am sure that they are intelligent and knowledgeable in their fields, it must be said that many are extremely novice computer users. They receive only a brief training course at the beginning of the year, and are expected to take in a large amount of unfamiliar knowledge in only an hour or two, so it’s not unusual for me to be asked for help with things most knowledgeable users would consider very simple.

Today, a user reported that she couldn’t access her network drive when trying to attach a document to an email. She had tried it on several computers, and a second user reported the same problem, so I logged it with the Helpdesk, and let the two users know that they would be notified by email when the problem was resolved, which I hoped would be shortly. Twenty minutes later, the first user came and found me again.

“It’s not working. I just got this thing, this email, all this stuff in my inbox.” I didn’t understand. Had she received an email from the Helpdesk? We previously had a problem with users being sent hundreds of copies of the same email. It had been resolved, but could it have reoccurred? After her repeating the same information several times, and me none the wiser, I thought it would be simpler just to check her computer. In her inbox was a mailer daemon “Could not be delivered” email, complete with a load of gibberish at the bottom. I asked her to clarify again what she had done. She explained that she had sent the email with the attachment, and received this back.

“Are you sure this is the right email address?” I asked.

“Well, no,” she replied. “But I sent other emails to the right address, and they didn’t work either.” I check that the second address she has tried is correct. It is. On closer inspection, the gibberish in the auto-return mail is a representation of the .wps document she has attached. A clue! We don’t use the .wps (Microsoft Works) format. She says she sent that one from home, but she has tried to send from on-site too, and is having the same problems. At this point, I decided to ask her to try sending an email again “in case it’s working now”. In fact, I wanted her to walk through exactly what she was doing; it wouldn’t be the first time that a user has been completely stumped by our email program which bears no resemblance to Hotmail, Yahoo, or any of the other webmail services they have used previously. No-one likes to look stupid, and placing the problem on the system is much better than placing it on the user (Blow the dust out of the connector - one of the tricks of Product Support).

She went through the process of writing a new email, entering the address, and then adding a new attachment. She went to browse for the document, and, “There! That’s all I can get - the email isn’t working!” A dialog had popped up, warning her that her network drive wasn’t available. Which we both knew. The problem she was experiencing was that she didn’t connect ‘network drive unavailable’ to ‘document unavailable’. As far as she was concerned, she wasn’t able to successfully send an email; that was the problem, and she didn’t know the cause. The stage where she was failing was irrelevant to her, but crucial to me when trying to diagnose her problem. It’s not that she was stupid, simply that she was operating outside her area of expertise. Her problem was easily solved by showing her how to temporarily save a document to the desktop and attach it to her email from there. She learnt that help is available when her two hours of “Beginner’s IT” fails her; and I learnt that I shouldn’t make any assumptions about what users are or aren’t doing, and that it is much simpler just to ask them to show me.

Photo by freefoto.