The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it.
On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it.
Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.
"We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of Mono."
Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html
On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it.
Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.