Check out this user experience test case—it has bigger implications than UX
Below is a video made in a user-testing lab in rural Pakistan, featuring a man in his 20s. He has used a feature phone but never a smartphone. He’s given a simple-sounding task: Go to Google and search for the the name of your favourite actress. Watch the video. Watch it all.
Presumably, he’s stuck because he’s been accustomed to a feature phone with physical keys, and he simply doesn’t know how to call up the virtual keyboard. Anytime you believe that doing something in your web app is “obvious” or “intuitive”, watch this video again.
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How many of your own assumptions in life are like this? How many times has something seemed so unbelievably obvious to you, only for you to discover that to someone else coming from a different perspective, it wasn’t obvious at all?