The study looked at basic technology tasks: things like using email, buying and returning items online, using a drop-down menu, naming a file on a computer or sending a text message.
Something to consider about your users.
I bring up this anecdote whenever someone else asserts "<simple technological skill> is common sense, no one could be confused by it".
Help your parents with tech support at least once a year (or your friends' parents if yours are technologically competent). It helps you keep a healthy perspective of how other people see our trade :P
I did that for a while, then once, when she had a basic problem with her printer, we spent a rather tense evening while I walked her through how I think through technical problems piece by piece and google stuff I don't know. She ended up figuring out a solution that I was unaware of.
She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me) tiny problems and how proud she was.
In my experience, it seems like often the biggest thing standing between people like her, and technology is their own believe in their inability and tendency to give up.
Some of that falls on us, every time we step in a solve a problem for them in (to them) an incomprehensible manner rather than helping them find the information the need to understand and solve the problem themselves, we help reinforce that belief.
I meant every word, too. I mean, I could describe the basic actions of concreting in a post, but I'd do a terrible job of it from both lack of interest in building and lack of practice. If you want a farm to fall apart, give it to me to maintain :)
It's not like we're expecting people to have a specialized skill in technology. They don't need to program.
Basic technical literacy should be treated like basic literacy: treated as a basic requirement of being a functioning adult and as something you would never outsource to others.
My mother does this sometimes too, it's really nice. She'll call me and tell me how she needed to add an additional email to her iPad. "Wait, needed? Past tense?" "Yes, I figured it out. I went into settings, then Mail, then..."
PCs never stuck with her. I still to this day have to explain the difference between left-click, right-click, and double-click. Why you need to double click on the desktop, or in a folder, but only single click from the Start Menu or quick-launch bar. Etc... But since getting her an iPad, she plays with it, and explores it the way I remember doing when we got our first computer with Windows 3.1.
Too many people from younger generations make fun of their parents for being technically illiterate. I spend an hour a week at least bringing my mom up to speed on Google Photos, iOS content management, etc.
It feels good seeing somebody learn how to do things for themselves, and you should hear your parents brag about you for your minor assistance.
Meh. It's not an age issue. Anybody who's the parent of a contemporary teenager is probably a gen X'er themselves and when we were teenagers people said the same shit. Except back then it was "parents can't program their VCR's but the teenagers can". It was bullocks then and it's bullocks now.
It's an attitude / interest / personality thing (or something like that) not age. Remember, the oldest generations still hanging around include people who built the first computers in existence, and slightly younger ones include the people who created UNIX, VMS, C, etc.
Some people are interested in technology and have a natural inclination to poke around and figure out how shit works, and some don't.
If you want to, you can always learn.
Most people just don't want to learn.
I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to my wife (elementary school teacher) why I need to spend much of my spare time on my laptop to try to keep up in the IT/tech industry. She just can't understand how I can 'train' myself new, marketable skills when she just has to go to official training sessions in class/lecture settings a few times per year.
Pretty frustrating.
The career structure, much like the rest of the country, is extremely pyramidical. So teaching in the slums requires a clean(ish) criminal record and frankly not much else, at least to get hired. On the other hand, civilized low crime areas are hyper competitive. So training and advanced degrees translate into nicer working environment.
There will be survivors even 3 or 4 half lives out in teaching, much like programming, but use em up and throw em away as a national policy does not encourage serious system wide training efforts.
It's all about reducing pain. If you're automating something simple (like a TODO list), it better be stupid-friendly. But expert-oriented UX is fine for complex expert-level problems.
A new product in that market, aimed at the same audience, say.. Sketch... needs a friendly UI because it doesn't have the same invested user base.
In other words, Photoshop's UI can be difficult because it's always been difficult and its always been the dominant player in the market, not because it's expert-oriented.
So you allow beginners to board, give them features they can use, and slowly show them more and more complex things till they feel confident using your product. That should be inherent in the design of the product. Then start adding features for experts that may screw things up if you don't know how to use them, but hide them a bit further in the tree.
Do they realize that the average American High-School aged student would consider almost all of those activities to be archaic relics of a bygone age? Young people don't use email or drop-down menus, and even texting is "so 2000's". American teens have moved on to Snapchat or whatever is after that.
Are you making a joke that went over my head?
I'm thinking in terms of "old style" drop down menus, as in ones you'd see in a browser on a desktop PC. As opposed to the newer style that replace those in smartphone apps and browsers.
Also, doesn't Snapchat require an email to register?
Probably, but that doesn't mean many young people actually use email, at least not on any regular basis. Heck, the stuff about young people not using email is so old now, I feel like I'm dating myself by mentioning it!
Do young people not use iMessage or any other messaging app to send text messages?
But is that what this study looked at?
Are you making a joke that went over my head?
Not really, but I may have been engaging in just a smidgen of hyperbole.