It’s also where I learned about Miller’s Law, which is kind of foundational for my attempts at user interviewing: "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of."

— Actually, (@eaton) December 18, 2021

I learned this working helpdesk. Most users have extremely bad models for what a computer does, how their own applications work, and often even for their own daily work processes. Being on helpdesk is about learning so much more than fixing a complex machine — instead, it encompasses deeply learning how the company itself works, what each piece of software does, how the average person uses it, what its failure cases are (in the technical and business sense), and on top of that understanding exactly how the model the user is instantiating to gravely misapprehend all of that is flawed. Often, it is impossible to correct the user’s utterly and multi-tieredly flawed model, but understanding why they think what they do and what they are are attempting to achieve is paramount to any sort of viable and long-lasting fix.

Being on helpdesk, in other words, is not an easy job. Not if you are in any good at it.