: Re: Is it okay to call the reader's target audience stupid? I'm a tech genre author, and have already published one book on Android development. However, this book was focused more on the developer

Among developers, you can frequently find statements in casual chats
saying stuff like users are stupid, if your software is idiot proof, a
better idiot will be its user etc, all basically saying that users do
not think the way we do, and what might be blindingly obvious to us,
is not so obvious to them.

"Users are stupid" is a pernicious attitude that many software developers have, and the world would be a better place if it could be eliminated. (For what it's worth, I've worked as a software engineer; I have a Ph.D. in computer science; and I now do research in the area of human-computer interaction. I've seen this attitude before.)

Back to business with an analogy: I've had to deal with medical doctors lately, on the patient side, and it's relatively easy to tell whether a doctor has a similar attitude: "Patients are stupid." How do you think our interaction worked? Not as well as it might have. Ditto car mechanics, lawyers, accountants, and anyone with specialized expertise. Some software developers seem to mistake inexperience or ignorance or lack of interest for stupidity. "I can program and you can't--you must be stupid." That sound ridiculous, just as it should.

I think it's a bad idea to encourage your readers to think of the users of their software as being stupid. It's not true, and in the end it will make it harder for them to take the user's perspective when building their systems.

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