Customer heal thyself

I have been thinking about how customers are best trained on using for example, a social network or ATS but have as ever totally missed the point.  They don't actually want guides and video, support teams and call centres, account managers and 'friends'.  They just don't want training, they want a UI that is so obvious it just works - so we stop bothering them!

I always think that if an e-commerce site requires that customers be trained before they can buy anything, then it will struggle at best.  Business technology, for the ad-hoc or base level user, should be simple and user friendly, avoiding the need to days of training.  Yet Is still see User manuals that make your inbox shudder as the 12mb file lands; no surprise User support get too many calls!