I actually did some user support at work today - one of our clients was having trouble uploading photos to our content management system and since there weren't any managers in and I was on phone duty, I got to sort it out. We got it working in the end, but not without a small amount of communication failure due to using different terminology for things. It wasn't an unpleasant experience at all, since the client was really nice and patient and seemed pretty smart too. But I've been thinking about it since, in particular small changes to the wording on the CMS interface that would make it easier to find out exactly what the user did to produce the results they're seeing - things as simple as writing "STEP 1: Do foo", "STEP 2: Do bar".
Normal (non-geek) people don't generally read out exactly what it says on the screen when you ask them what they did, or what happened. They paraphrase. If they clicked on a link that said "Confirm registration numbers", they might say "I checked the registration numbers". "STEP 1" and "STEP 2" aren't the kind of thing you paraphrase though. I think. Note that none of this speculation is properly tested.
Next time I design a user interface, I'm going to visualise how I'd talk a non-technical user through using it, over the phone.
That's not the kind of thing I usually write here, is it. I wonder if this is going to turn into a real blog.