Why target audience matters

This is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down.
No,  not really.  It is a story to remind you for whom you develop software,  the so called user.
This summer I had to get a new passport as my old one would expire while being abroad. So I ordered one and got an email shortly after, that I could fetch it at the townhall.
And here it got interesting. An elderly lady was at the counter telling me that I just had to sign a form that I had received the passport. German beaucracy,  you know. But she didn’t know how to print that form with their software. So she called the support Hotline.  Since it was about 5:30pm no one answered. Surprise,  surprise. Then she yelled for a colleague. And i mean yelled… he was about 30 so i had some hope. Which vanished when he pulled the old “turn it off and on” trick. After some minutes of resultless clicking, he called another colleague.  Luckily,  no yelling. But clerk #3 didn’t know either.  I asked to help, but wasn’t allowed on the other side of the desk. After another 5 minutes of trying together (all three that is), the elderly lady suddenly remembered that there were still some already  printed forms in a back room. She fetched one,  manually filled the required data and let me sign. Brave new world.

I was quite angry afterwards. Not at the people working there, but at the developers. Because they didn’t keep in mind that the users of the software not necessarily have a high computer literacy. And they needn’t,  it is just a tool for them, but it wasn’t self explanatory.  And that should always be kept in mind when developing for such a target audience: make it easily usable!