In one section of his piece he describes how we have moved away from the the post industrial economy attitude of “we are what we buy” to a new concept of “we are what we do”. So many online concepts are based around the user telling the world what they are doing; Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Plurk etc are all based around the simple concept of displaying what the user is currently doing to as many people as possible. In order to have more validity and social standing in the online environment people join more and more online groups to enable them to tell more and more people what they are doing.

This creates what Bogost call the Membership Economy, explaining how previously our social standing may have come from what we owned now comes from where we are and what we are doing. How is this measured? The number of followers on Twitter? The numer of friends on Facebook? Or is it the number of Tweets and status updates instead? It’s hard to say, but it is probably going to be one of the most important metrics on the internet in coming years. Defining the Membership Economy may well be the solution that so many social networks have been trying to solve; when keeping up with the Jones’ is it those who have the most listeners or those who say the most that we should be keeping an eye on?

This is something that pops up in my work every now and then, and always catches me by surprise. Clients who come to view our user testing sessions and watch users struggling with their site simply dismiss the subjects at “stupid users”. What’s funny about this is it is absolutely right as well as the most idiotic thing you could ever say.

So the user in testing was stupid, fair enough. They also fit the profile of your standard customer pretty perfectly. Could it be that your customers are stupid?

Despite an increased acceptance of the need for user testing and user centred design, there still seems a degree of failure to accept the results that come back are based on real users. Frequently scenarios arise that go something like this:
Me: “Users showed difficulty locating content/feature/section”
Developer: “But it’s right there, behind the that green button”
Me: “True, but no one clicked on that button”
Developer “But everyone in the office knew to click on it! And it’s the same button design that Digg/Flickr/Google are using”
Me: Yes, but your users don’t work in a design agency, and your site is not Digg/Flickr/Google your actually selling maternity wear to 50+ year old retired sailors. Not quite the Digg crowd.”

To return to the beginning of this post. The issue with Scott Karp and his local paper may or may not be that the site should have catered to his needs. Perhaps a thorough test of the site revealed that virtually no users wanted local content without first having to register and then sign in, and I’mcertainly not going to enter the argument for how newspapers currently handle their on line content. The issue that I raise is that of dismissing a poor user experience as out of the ordinary. So everyone in testing used your site like total morons? Well, the world is full of morons and they’ve all got disposable incomes so get on board and make a site for morons. There are no stupid users, just those who can find stuff on your site and those who cannot. So instead of dismissing those who cannot as stupid why not embrace them, build sites that they like to use, use language that speaks to them, graphics that are appealing and suggestive and an architecture that is intuitive?
Do this and I guarantee that in your next round of testing all users will somehow be magically less stupid.