Recently, we watched a focus group of new Recruiters tackle a series of online job boards. (Focus groups are all the rage in front end design these days even though they don't seem to add all that much to the process.) There were about a dozen Recruiters who had been brought together to test various aspects of a new Recruiting interface. The company tried to balance the group by providing 6 Recruiters of varying ages who had no web experience with another 6 who had varying degrees of web experience. The results were comical.

One of the options in the new interface asked Recruiters to hold down the "CTRL" key while clicking a mouse. Two of the dozen (one in the "experienced" group) held down the C, T, R, and L keys (instead of the "control" key). Besides the silly hand contortions (try to hold all 4 and click your mouse), a more serious point emerged.

As we get more sophisticated in our web usage, we tend to take a lot of the little things for granted. Many new users have not climbed the learning curve along with us. The other side of Sumser's law is "As the median experience of a new user declines, your relative level of experience grows exponentially." It is critical that you learn to account for the fact that each day you gain additional experience that increasingly distances you from the average user.

- John Sumser