Build for real people

One of our toughest tasks is user testing; for two reasons.
First, that it's never easy to test something that's different from what people are already using - especially something, like an intelligencing network, that's conceptual. All user feedback is useful ... but it can be frustrating when the user is focusing on issues you're not testing and doesn't find particularly comprehensible - for all sorts of valid reasons for which, don't misunderstand me, I don't blame them - the issues you are testing.
So, for instance, if a user participating in a test just can't see how Facebook or Ning could ever be a learning tool, it's a bit awkward to move onto the 'how' and 'what would you do with this' questions.
The second reason, though, is more complex - though connected with the first. As you move through the user testing, you find out not just what people want - or are able to visualise or realise it - but also where they're starting from technologically. And from time to time. it can make you re-think your starting points.
Example: one of our producers was doing the intro spiel to a testing session and hit the 'minimize' button on the browser to disappear one window and move on to the one beneath.
"How did you do that ???" one of the guinea pigs asked, genuinely amazed.
Example: we were user testing an online course - I don't like 'online courses' as a rule but sometimes in organisations producing them is the line of least resistance. The front page offered several ways of cutting the content - including a 'Browse' button.
"What does 'browse' mean ??"
Example: in the same online course, some of the content was too long for the window so the developer had put a scrollbar down the right hand side of the window.
"This text goes off the bottom."
"You can use the scrollbar."
"What's a scrollbar."
Now I'm not sharing these examples to humiliate these users or ask 'would you believe it?' These were authentic reactions and it's our job to take them seriously and at face value. And the lesson of that is that even within a technologically mature organisation such as the BBC, the individual experience of that technology is not even. And that as producers and developers of online learning materials we have to take into account that uneven experience.
We geeks find it much easier to build stuff for other geeks. The big lesson from all of this is - build for real people.