Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs

Needless to say, the teacher was curious as to why I started getting 120 wpm on every test, so when she asked me I figure I'd just tell her the truth, and explained how I editted the file. She thought it was funny and creative, and (after I demonstrated that I really was learning how to type anyway) just gave me an A in the class.

Shame schools don't teach exploration and play with computers.

Squeak eToys were all about that!

That's absurd. Knowing URL structure (or enough about it to figure out what site you're on) is something that is necessary to use the internet. Phishing scams are the obvious reason, but also for things like this where that little bit of knowledge make the difference between success and failure.

In theory, they ought not need to, but as currently constructed, they do need to because hard drives are terribly unreliable, and people expect to rely on them. If you explain to them that their thesis is being stored inside a little box that has a few discs of thin aluminium covered in rust and that they're being spun in space 5000 times a minute, then just sometimes they understand why they ought to have some sort of backup strategy. Some people will take your advice without understanding but most are skeptical of inconvenient claims and won't act without understanding.

It's like people shouldn't have to understand anything beyond that their car has a 'stop pedal'. But it's still really important for people to understand that they have brakes in their car, that the breaks wear out, don't work well in some kinds of conditions, and make certain sounds when they need fixing.

Sub-optimal conditions both, but a necessary artifact of current levels of technology. Now, ABS systems have reduced some of that wet-weather cognitive load with software. Online backup services are a start in that direction for hard drives. But until it comes as part of the built-in price of the computer (that is a sellable feature) and high-speed Internet is pervasive, people still need to worry about it. At least until dual SSD's are standard equipment.

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/03/10/banks-dont-hel...

http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2009/08/21/chase-insecure

Chase sent me this, too. If you visit the site in Chrome, it tells you it's a suspected phishing site.

Or, let me put it this way: the "end result" is what most people want and will pay money for!

Why should a Facebook user be interested in the structure of a URL? Why should someone who uses a word processor be interested in hard drives? Isn't that like expecting all drivers to know the mole-fraction of pentane in their summer fuel blend? Drivers shouldn't need to know a whole lot about their cars. A lot of drivers would rather not know. They just want to get where they are going. A lot of companies that realized this made their shareholders tons of money in the past several decades.

I'm telling you: give your computers game mechanics to learn your app. Facebook should buy you a pig and give you a diploma if you figure out how to log into them without Google. It would solve the problem in a week. (Test first, obviously.)

Heck, Facebook could make a "user education tithe" of virtual goodies a condition of being listed in their programs. Got 1M users and want more? Pony up goodies for us to expand the platform with. It is in your long-term best interests. It is in your short-term best interests, too, if your short-term future would be compromised by us turning your notifications off.

Is that so wrong when the "whole process" is frequently opaque, confusing, error-prone, poorly explained, and irrelevant to the task at hand? Be aware that you're subject to a cognitive bias: You find computers inherently interesting and worthy of attention. (You wouldn't be here if you didn't.) Other people, perhaps people whose initial experiences with computers are unlike yours, do not feel the same way and do not have the same intuitive sense that the "whole process" is worth attending to that you do.

That is to say you have something like hindsight--it's obvious to you, bearer of a certain understanding, but to someone who doesn't know what you know, it isn't obvious what things they should be paying more attention to or what specific things they need to understand. Too often we think "They should know more about computers", which is very vague and ignores all of the things that people do tend to learn quite well.

Your understanding comes from years of built-up cognitive models about how these things work. The thing is: So does theirs. Like you, they've built a model that works well enough to do what they want to do. The difference is that they've learned things like "If I meddle with things I don't understand, I might break something." and "If I break this computer, I won't be able to fix it." and "If I can't fix it, I will feel stupid and have to ask or pay for help." These are maladaptive (though too often true), but they are still learned things, and I think it's a big mistake to ignore them when thinking about why users seem to be unwilling to learn other things.

...tools that are actually designed to make their experience easier, faster, and more efficient.

Those features and tools are not perfect. They fail. But form follows failure, which is why for instance several browsers now default to an interface that shows screenshots of frequently-used sites (the others all default to search pages). This accomplishes the approximately same thing as bookmarking or setting a home page without user action at all, and without relying on page titles or URLs for recognition. In time, the ways that this fails will become evident, too.

Bear in mind, too, that unless they have some specific motivation or inspiration for change, people are more prone to do what they know works than to experiment for the sake of it. The RWW story is particularly relevant because of the often ignored detail that what those users were trying to do (Google for "facebook login") actually works most of the time. Until a series of basically reasonable assumptions failed, they had no intrinsic reason to do things differently.