People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more. Don’t let knowledge blind you.

The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference.

Early in my legal career, I worked at a firm that represented a group of Nob Hill condo owners who had had a series of problems with contractors and who had suffered a variety of damages relating to roof leaks, etc. This might sound mundane but these "condos" were (even in that day back in the early 1980s) worth well into 7 figures and the problems had been persistent and severe. Yet, when it came time to settle the case, we had to prepare a set of instructions explaining the settlement documents and where they needed to be signed. We were dealing with perhaps 30 people and they were all ultra-sophisticated types (former board of supervisors members in SF, top-flight lawyers, very wealthy business owners, etc.) and nearly every one of them messed up the execution of the documents in one way or another. When this happened to me, I learned one very important lesson: maybe I had been so immersed in this process that the detailed explanations made perfect sense to me, logically and otherwise, and even appeared to be simple, but, for those who have busy lives and who don't want to have to analyze in detail a set of potentially intricate legal instructions, such instructions were not simple at all. Why? Not because of lack of intelligence (these were very smart and successful people). Rather, because they were not familiar with the legal mumbo-jumbo and they didn't want to bother to go down the rabbit-hole of trying to figure them out. In effect, they simply wanted a "just tell me where to sign" sort of instruction (which suggested the obvious answer as well, because the matter did need explanations for them to be able to sign in an informed way - that answer was to just set up an in-person meeting with them as a group, give the explanations, and then have them sign).

This same principle operated with the big name partners in this large firm (some of the best lawyers in the nation), who couldn't be bothered with computers because "typing is secretary's work" (this was around 1980). These were exceedingly smart people but it did not fit their point of reference to bother themselves with trying to learn about some newfangled technology that seemed like a lot of bother to learn when their life-long habits had taught them that there is no advantage to investing time in that process.

Of course, with engineering design, one needs to anticipate what a very broad range of potential users might do with an interface that is developed by software engineers who may or may not share the point of reference of a great many such users. Concerning such issues, it is not "dumb" for an older generation to eschew text messages when they are used simply to picking up the phone to talk something over and, when they are forced to actually do a text message, to become frustrated with having to learn something that is not intuitive to them and that may lie well outside of their point of reference. Nor is this an issue merely of age and habits. Non-engineers have nowhere near the breadth of knowledge about such items as engineers do (the main point of this piece) and there are legendary examples of the boneheaded instructions that have sometimes been given because of the blind spot that this can create ("how do I sign on with my ISP when I have never had access to the Internet before [this was in the early 1990s]? simple, just log on to the web at xxxxx and follow the instructions").

Moreover, this issue can be generalized as well. If I have specialized knowledge about a given area (such as law), things that seem obvious and even intuitive to me may very easily not be at all comprehensible to one who does not share that point of reference. I realized this fundamental truth early on in my career in dealing with clients: that is, that learning to communicate effectively and simply about a complex subject matter is an art form.

There is no mechanical answer to it except that one must put oneself as best as one can in the place of the recipient of that knowledge and try to anticipate what the person does not know about the assumptions you will be making in giving the explanation.

None of this means that you are of superior intelligence to those with whom you seek to communicate. It only means that you have a specialized expertise that they lack and you have a tall order before you in being able to guide them by the hand, as it were, to make your explanation or instructions (or interface design) understandable. This is not at all easy to do. Indeed, it is one of the toughest challenges extant in the design world, and that is precisely why superb and elegant interface design (among other things) is so hard to come by.

I would therefore amend the main point of this fine article to say, "People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more [about your area of expertise]. Don’t let knowledge blind you."