Stupid User Model

The Stupid User Model is the brainchild of the legal profession, the lovechild of manufacturers and lawyers, and the adopted son of manual writers.

Its origins can be traced back to one Pat Kaplan -- a manufacturer of small household goods. Pat, always looking for ways to improve and expand, suddenly had a marvelous idea to double sales; yet Pat also shrewdly realized there would be complications. To help solve them, Pat placed a call to a friend (who also happened to be a lawyer) and posed the following question to him: "What if a man wanted to use my products?"

That fateful phone call marked the beginning of a chain of events that would lead to the Stupid User Model. The lawyer recalls:

"I had no idea what I was getting into when Pat asked me that question. At first I thought it was ridiculous -- if a man wanted to use the product, he would just go out and use it. So, I went out and bought, uh, I think they were tweezers, to try... I ended up having to phone Pat, who had to come over to my house and show me.

"So I began gathering other men around and lo-and-behold, if given the products on their own, they would end up injuring themselves -- they couldn't use them without supervision.

"I thought to myself, 'this is unacceptable, there must be a way to let men use these as well.' Once it occurred to me that men could at least read, I knew what the answer was. I had no idea that it would become so popular though."

But his 'warning labels' did become popular—so popular, that it was necessary to establish guidelines for determining just how the warnings should be constructed, and even if they should be called 'warnings' at all (some groups, having been informed by their marketing department that 'warning' had a negative connotation, had instead introduced 'instruction labels'). After many meetings and conferences among the lawyers and the manufactures, a set of rules that everyone could agree to was forged, and these collectively came to be known as the Stupid User Model.

The content of the Stupid User Model is highly guarded by those in manufacturing, so little is known about its content; in fact, it is difficult to get any of them to admit to even having such a model. Yet over time some information has leaked out, and so it is at least known that the Stupid User Model is based upon the following principle:

No matter what product you make (nor how simple it is), the user will not be able to figure out how to properly use this product, nor will he realize any dangers involved.

However, while the model is constrained to that guiding principle, the actual details remain a closely guarded secret.