Dylan Greene dot com

Part of an email from a Papa John's employee:

I don't know how responsible he was for the new F****-UP computer system, which loses pizza orders and is otherwise incredibly stupid, like some screens saying "Press CONFIRM Key" when they use standard PC keyboards with no such key - while other screens say "Press F10 key" or whatever real key is necessary. The pizza order screen, the most used screen on the system, shows what several F keys do, but does NOT show what F key to go to the next screen. Go look, in any Papa John's. Remember lots of hs dropouts are working there all over the country. The computer system is losing orders and that contributes to the 6% drop.

Lesson: Test your software with your users.  It doesn't matter how smart, cleaver, or budget-minded you think you are, if you are not using real users, or personas based on real users, you are designing for a mythical user that does not exist.