These days, you need to run so much protection software on your computer to prevent malicious attacks, viruses, worms, hijacking — your garden variety Internet security problems. So, like any good Internet user, I enlist the help of anti-spyware, anti-virus software and firewall protection. The problem for me comes when I have to make a decision about what I want the product to do. For example, the firewall program I use asks me if I want some program or other to access something through a random port, or some such thing.

Now, certainly, there are times I understand what this firewall program is asking: Do I want Outlook to check for my email at my pop account? Do I want Firefox to access a web site? These things I understand. Unfortunately, it also asks things I don’t get: “The NDIS User mode I/O driver is trying to access [....something...] through remote host [...blah blah blah...]. Do you want to allow this?” Hmm, well, let me think a moment…

It’s a really good question, I am certain of it. The problem is — and I consider myself a reasonally computer-literate person — I don’t know what an NDIS User mode I/O driver is (though I know what a driver is), and I don’t know why it would need to access some remote host.

How helpful is this question, really? Couldn’t this program just let me know — in some semblance of plain English — what it is I am trying to decide? Tell me what this NDIS User mode I/O driver thing is, or maybe what it does, or even perhaps what kind of risk I am taking if I say yes. This is the kind of message that makes some people feel panicky, like other such helpful application questions like:

• “Are you sure?”
• “Abort, cancel, retry”

I can already hear what’s coming — “get a Mac.” Sure, that could be a solution to my problem, but really not my point. Here is my point: If you want people to use your product, and feel like it is truly offering protection, make them feel empowered and confident in their yes or no decisions. So much runs in the background on a PC, I may have no clue what it is, causing me to make a bad decision and not allow access, and then create a problem for myself because an application or service is blocked and won’t operate correctly — or at all.

This is a basic usability problem, with a pretty simple fix. If you want an average user to use your technology product, make sure an average user can understand important messages from your application. The best way to make this happen:

1. have a copywriter or technical writer write alert messages instead of engineers or software programmers
2. build and update a database of basic information about programs, services and other things that require network access, so a user can look up an answer if they don’t understand the alert message
3. provide a rating system (low, medium, high) that helps a user make decisions about network access