Want good UX? Expect less from your audience.

In Episode 14, host Virgil Carroll and co-host Cole dig into a core truth behind most UX mistakes: people don’t pay attention. From sending a message to the wrong person to confusing web forms, today’s digital missteps often stem from one thing—poorly designed experiences that expect users to be careful, focused, or even logical.

But here’s the hard truth: they’re not.

That’s why UX exists—to design for inattention, not perfection. In this episode, Virgil and Cole explore how small misjudgments in interface design can lead to big problems, and why it’s time to stop blaming the user and start designing smarter.

They dig into key lessons and takeaways, including:

✅ Why assuming users will “just pay attention” is a guaranteed way to fail

✅ The danger of designing tools for internal teams instead of real users

✅ How AI and other tools can mislead teams if used without critical thinking

✅ Why user feedback beats assumptions—every single time

✅ What it really means to design for the lowest common denominator

From confusing buttons and abandoned carts to real-world usability failures, Virgil shares insights from decades of experience that highlight how easy it is to get digital experiences wrong when we ignore how people actually behave.

If you’ve ever wondered why people keep screwing up your carefully planned interface—or if you’re trying to build something that works for all humans, not just ideal ones—this episode’s for you.

For more conversations about digital strategy, UX, accessibility, and all the ways we get it wrong (and how to get it right), visit www.discussingstupid.com and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

(0:00) - Intro

(2:10) - People don't pay attention

(4:41) - Are people bad at browsing or is tech too complex?

(6:49) - Will AI shape the future of UX?

(10:50) - The gap between internal assumptions and real user needs

(14:27) - Build for the lowest common denominator

(17:40) - Outro

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Transcript

>> Virgil: If you go with the assumption that people always pay attention to what they're doing and that they'll always understand what you're presenting, then you've basically set yourself up 100% for failure. you've got to figure out exactly what they will pay attention to and how they'll do it and plan it around that.

>> Intro Speaker: You're ​listening ​to ​Discussing ​Stupid, ​a ​podcast ​sponsored ​by ​High Monkey. ​​Join ​your ​host, ​Virgil ​Carroll ​and ​others ​as ​our ​podcast ​helps ​you ​transform ​bad ​digital ​experiences ​into ​teachable ​moments ​you ​can ​use. 

>> Virgil: I'm not a political person by nature, and so this is not a political episode, but it might be an episode that is kind of motivated by something that recently happened that a lot of people think of as political, uh, and that is signal gate. And so I'm not going to talk about this from a political perspective, but I am going to talk about it from a user experience perspective. Because reality is, is there is a good reason that we have the field of user experience and everything that goes along with it, and that is because people will do really stupid things. And I wish that I could say that what happened in that particular instance is not something I've seen before, in other scenarios. Uh, but it is. And so today we're going to spend some time kind of talking about why it's important to do user experience type testing and evaluating and just having an overall philosophy around making things easier for people. Because the reality is, much like the title of our podcast, people do stupid things. And we always have to make sure that we're handling those.

>> Virgil: See right, the whole point is, and you know, kind of going off of signal gate, is there's a reason we need usability. And the reason is, is people do stupid things all the time. I mean, and that. That's kind of the point is, you know. If people paid attention and they read well and they didn't, you know, do things like believe, you know, look at a meme. You know, we weren't in a meme culture. We weren't in that kind of stuff, it would be. But one of the problems that, you know, a lot of orgs have from the standpoint of, you know, kind of building out user experiences, digital user experiences in particular, is that People don't pay attention. And that's not something new. That's been for a long time. People don't do it, you know, and so a lot of times we build interactions that require people to pay attention to what they're doing and that.

>> Virgil: Oh, it is, yeah. Yeah. You know, I even remember like working back with DEED and the unemployment system, you know, just how many struggles people have with it. And that's because that system, you have to pay a lot of attention to what you're doing in there. and you know, most people just don't. And so they end up, they... I know they've done some improvements to the system, but overall, you know, part of the thing was they said that the system actually where it took care of some routine things overall from the applicant side probably increase their call volume. So they needed actually a bigger call center because people would call because they didn't understand how to do things or they do them wrong and they'd get denied, you know, benefits. And that kind of, It's an interesting area that, you know, there's a reason we need user experience and to make interaction simple is because we can't rely on the fact that people are going to understand the kitschy, more complex things we do. And if the goal of the site is to get them, to be successful and go where we want them to go, then we've got to make that easy and not try to make it fancy.

>> Cole: Yeah, I guess in like preparing for this episode, I was like, kind of battling with two, like different ideas around this topic. And it's like, okay, do people need to be more attentive and like, intentional with how they're using technology? Does it fall on the people or does it fall on like the people who are, you know, designing the tech that people use? And I think it's a little bit of both.

>> Virgil: Well, I mean, it's both. But give, up on the people using it. I mean, that doesn't happen. We, we are a generation now that, you know, you press big buttons on a phone and it makes stuff happen. And so you can wish that all you want, but the reality is, you know, there's the part of the experience you can affect and there's a part of experience you can't affect and that we, you know, when I sit down with people and talk about this, I always say, you know, sure, we want our users to do exactly what we want them to do. But here's the reality. We have no control over them because our people that visit our sites could be anybody on the planet in that. And guess what? We can't control what anybody on the planet does in that. what we can control is what we do and how we present things and how we make them accessible for them. And that really is the key to that, is that that's what we can do from our side in there. And it's amazing how many times I run into sites that it's just like they needed this and they wanted this outcome, so they built something specifically to that that they understand internally so that whether it's their marketers or their IT like, oh, we know how this works. Yeah. And then they're always shocked that nobody else on the planet did. I just said, you know, it just, it makes me laugh because, you know, you know, to me this is not a rocket science type thing. Yes. Building good user interfaces and good interaction experience in that, is not just something you can do simply and easily, but overall it's not something that you should be surprised you need to do. And it's amazing how much we do. And recent current events have definitely shown that, know, people do stupid things. Even in very important sensitive areas, people will just do stupid things.

>> Cole: Where do you think, AI fits in this whole equation?

>> Virgil: Ah, yeah, well, you know, my opinion on AI and probably people that listen to it are starting to understand my opinion on AI. Um there's some interest. I mean, you know, the one thing I think that if I was to go first to a benefit of AI in this is AI has no emotion. And a lot of times things that get done in a bad way are because of emotion. It's because people think, well, but I really needed to do this, or I really know this is the way I want it to go, or this is something important to me. The emotion of it, versus the objectability of what if you're trying to build something that every person on the planet can use, what do you need to do to make that happen? Now, of course a lot of people would argue, you know, if I have, from an engineering company in Minnesota and I have an engineering site, that's probably not such a big deal, because not everybody in the planet is going to go there. But you and I both know, you know, when we look at our, you know, Google Analytics and that people all over the world visit our site all the time, we have no idea why. I mean, sometimes it's to read one of our blog post articles or something like that, but they just do that. but AI has this objectivity. Otherwise it's going to look at things very much based on, you know, kind of analytics and analysis and everything else. And it doesn't have any emotion to why it makes a decision on the other side. the part that I find funny about AI is how much people just take what it gives you back at face value and says, well, this is true. you might remember when you and I were first looking at ChatGPT and kind of exploring it as a something to help us out with the, you know, speed up some of our marketing stuff and that just so that we don't almost have to generate initial content. And you might remember that, I asked it to tell me about High Monkey. Do you, do you remember that? And then just how. Yeah, the first paragraph was awesome and it was very accurate. And then it went down this path and it was like, you know, it was like I was part of a big conglomerate and all this stuff like that. And it was like, well, none of that's true. And it's like it just made up crap, from there. So I think it has some, some options on there. But the reality is, is from an AI standpoint, if you ask AI to build you a user interaction, it will probably build you that user interaction. But that doesn't mean that user interaction is easy to use. And that's what a lot of people are doing, is they're trying to build things so that people understand and, and you know, good content and all that kind of stuff. And it's amazing how much AI generates like, really difficult to understand content. I've seen that, I've seen people use it to plan out interactions and it does it, but it doesn't do it in a way that's meaningful to the people. So the reality is we're starting to use these technologies in just internal roundtables and discussions that, to replace what we really need to be doing, which is talking to the people that actually use our stuff and figuring out what would be easiest for them and what would make the most sense for them. And that's the piece of it that is really like, well, from there.

>> Cole: Yeah, I think with AI, it becomes kind of the biggest problem at, least in my eyes, when people are just taking the responses that they're getting out of the GPTs and then just taking that at face value and not using their critical thinking skills to think, on if this is like a something I should really follow through with. Or not. I think either way, if you're going to use AI, right, you need to like, still be using your brain and then like, iterate, iterate, iterate. but I mean, most people aren't going to do that. So that's where I. It's kind of why I wanted to bring up AI, because it's like people are just using it.

>> Virgil: Well, and it's not even AI, it's just other tools. I mean, how many times do we evaluate tools, you know, whether to use internally or use with a customer? And it's like, this one does these things really well and this thing does this really well. But guess what? We need both of those. But neither of them do both of them great. And, you know, so, I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a lot of tools and been like, man, if we could just have this piece from this piece, this piece from this piece, and this piece from this piece, it'd be there. But then you'd go to another company and they're like, well, we don't really need that. We need this and this, but we don't need that. But we need this up here in that. And, and that's kind of the problem for it is that, you know, I mean, it's the reason usability is out there in the first place and that there's, you know, so much information about it and, and that. And organizations need to take that as, you know, really actionable things that they have to do. And it's still amazing how many, you know, websites or internal systems or software products or that are still driven by what internal people think.

>> Cole: And speaking of actionable things to do, please like and subscribe and follow us and share this podcast, because that helps a lot. You know, we need some new listeners because we like talking about this stuff. but, you know, we gotta get more ears familiar with Discussing Stupid.

>> Virgil: That's very true. I mean, you know, it's, it's all a process in that. It's amazing. I mean, you even take a podcast like this and, you know, you've got to release it across, you know, 20 different kinds of channels. You know, you have to be on YouTube, you have to be an audio version, you have to do, you know, really cool graphics for the video. You've got all these things to be able to try and get people to do that. It just is what it is. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's just like, you know, with us doing our website and talking about like screen sizes and that kind of stuff. You know, you've got to have things that fit like, like 500 different screen sizes. And people just don't think about that stuff. I mean, it is. And you know, which is why I think it's such an interesting topic to talk about. Because even though people might be, well, this is stuff we know, it's like, well, sure, it's things, you know, but does anybody actually do anything with it in that? So it still amazes me today, you know, how many times we, we enter situations or we come in after a situation where somebody's like, well, we talked about it, but we just never really looked at this is an important thing. And now once they've gotten feedback that the site was very difficult to use or people wasn't finding things or whatever their objectives were, weren't doing it, and they're like, well, what happened? It's like, well, did you ever go out and talk to people and actually see if that's what they wanted to do and that's how they wanted to do it? And no, in that. And so, you know, there, there's this concept that, you know, because we're the company, we know the product and we know what everybody wants. and all I can say is throughout my entire, you know, entire 27 years of doing this, nobody's been right ever.

>> Cole: I was, you know, thinking about how like, how can people who are making interfaces for people to use, how can they like counteract the tendency towards, inattention with users? and some things that came to mind were, you know, designing with user limitations in mind, like just thinking about how inattentive people are and doing user testing. I think that's a big thing. And then also, in general having more...

>> Virgil: I mean, I always say you have to build to the lowest common denominator. You know, you have to think who is your most simplistic user you're ever going to have on your site in that. And so you have to look at things like, you know, like the, the minimum federal standard of an 8th grade reading level. I mean, you know, yeah, that's a requirement by, you know, government websites. But overall it's a great rule of thumb because you never know that you're going to have somebody that is highly advanced in their knowledge visiting, your site. You have to look at things. I mean I can tell you back, you know, back in 2001, I can think of this specifically in 2001 I was working on a project and it was a group of people, in just kind of an interesting. I'm not going to say it because I don't want to pick on any types of worlds, but it was just an interesting group of people and I did a bunch of usability tests with them and it was amazing how many of them were conflicted by having a button that said the word continue versus a button that said the word next. Now to me that should be the exact same thing and not it, but it was amazing how many, they were like, what am I continuing? And we don't really think about that, that people actually think about these things in today, in today's world where there's so much more, you know, chance of, you know, malicious activities and going to wrong websites and people are getting more educated about that. People are more cautious about completing processes that they don't feel a hundred percent confident about. And so a lot of times that's where you can look like if you're an E commerce site, you can look at like abandoned carts and that kind of stuff. And a lot of times like, was it they didn't want this or did they not understand how to finish the process or did they not have confidence in finishing the process? So there's lots of things like that that you can look at, from that side. But yeah, I mean the biggest thing is, is if you don't know and you're unsure, ask, you know, I mean in simplest terms, I mean you can do testing, you can do a lot of fancy things and do that. But it's amazing how many people just don't call up a customer and say, hey, you know, wondering what you think of X process or this part of our site. And you know, obviously we've done that with our podcast with some of our customers that we know are listening to it and getting their feedback on it, getting some really good feedback on it, which is one of the big reasons we changed the intro to the podcast and we've actually already seen a benefit that, you know, before that, we were getting people to listen to about the first 17 seconds of, the intro, and that was it. And now we're up to over two minutes, which is actually getting into the podcast itself, in there. So that's a big, you know, win.

>> Cole: Well, nothing will ever replace user feedback.

>> Virgil: Exactly. And I think that's the lesson is, you know, if you. You go with the assumption that people always pay attention to what they're doing and that they'll always understand what you're presenting, then you've basically set yourself up 100% for failure. you've got to figure out exactly what they will pay attention to and how they'll do it and plan it around that.

>> Cole: All right, well, I think we give some good little tidbits of actionable insights here. How to create some better user experiences for people. Thanks everyone for tuning in to this week's episode.

>> Virgil: Yep. Thank you.

>> Virgil: Just a reminder, we'll be dropping new episodes every two weeks. If you enjoyed the discussion today, we would appreciate it if you hit the like button and leave us a review or comment below. And to listen to past episodes or be notified when future episodes are released, visit our website at www.discussingstupid.com and sign up for our email updates. Not only will we share when each new episode drops, but also we'll be including a ton of good content to help you in discussing stupid in your own organization. Of course, you can also follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or SoundCloud, or really any of the other favorite podcast platforms you might use. Thanks again for joining, and we'll see you next time.