The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
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GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. And so on. If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic level. This knowledge is getting forgotten as "designers" take creative steps to eliminate seemingly all thought that goes along with software usage. Nowadays "user-friendly" software has 100 different ideas about how to accomplish a task and it almost always involves hiding scary things from stupid users. Which also means that when something goes wrong you have no control over fixing it -- you're simply fucked. Unlike the past when there was usually an option checkbox buried in a comprehensive Preferences window, and you could disable/modify the unwanted behavior.
Ironically seemingly every app has to insult me with oftentimes unskippable tutorials and announcements just to reveal features that should have been easy to discover, but aren't, because the design language and UI standards have been forgotten and/or ignored.
Extensability and control should be WAY more important than catering to the most ignorant users.
I find modern applications (especially mobile ones) much harder to discover and use. If you're a teen, you have plenty of time to experiment, but as an adult, I just want to get the work done.
Yeah, you could say that I don't want to learn.. but I just want to learn bare minimum to get the job done. The application itself doesn't have to be minimalistic.
Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them?
So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.
It would certainly lessen the incentive to switch apps if it was difficult to learn the one you know.
It's recognition over recollection.
It is well known that recognition is easier, and that's why consistency help so much.
But used everywhere, as if it was the only available tool, it makes discoverability less safe, hence it reduces it.
If street signs are well positioned I don't need to know the route, if there are no signs and I don't recognize the place, I'm doomed.
If an app does one thing, it's easy to remember how to do that one thing.
But if another app does the same thing in a different way, now I have to remember two things and recall from memory which one uses which way.
I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life.
Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding.
The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.
A lot of what he says resonates with me. Except the bit about computers needing to be difficult to encourage learning. That's the adversity-builds-character mindset that I disagree with. The computer I learned to hack on was a Macintosh IIsi. It wasn't bare metal like a 8-bit computer that booted into BASIC. Nor finicky with lots of arcane configurations like a Windows 3.1 machine (and I've used both of those as well). It had all the it just works plug-and-play that he laments in Windows 7 but as a curious kid with a hacker mentality it served me just fine. Enough that by the time I graduated from it I was modifying the System with hooks written in 680x0 assembly.
But the author really goes wrong, I believe, in his conclusion that the cause of digital literacy is served by forcing users to be gurus. This is entirely wrong and is the crux of the observation I made above. There is a myth in UX development that programmers are targeting a conceptual user that exists somewhere on a continuous slope between novice and power user. The article ends with suggesting that computers be taught by setting people onto this theoretical path. (And to be honest I think he's mistaken that this isn't what we've already been doing and shown to not be effective.) But what if that path doesn't exist? Then trying to teach anyone that way will be fruitless.
My thought is that there is no gradual progression. Most people are not going to be able to learn computers the way that you and I have. So they need different ways of using computers than what we are used to. And that will mean a lot of disruptive ideas, which we may be suspicious of and call it "dumbing down". But what we should be more skeptical of is our own assumptions.
So if average people want to learn computers differently than nerds do, what we certainly don't want is to cut off the paths of discovery that lead to the next generation of super users, hackers, and developers. Both ways need to be preserved and encouraged to allow average users to get the most benefit of technology, while encouraging the more in-depth learning by those who want to be more deeply involved.
Running on my desktop this very second; Postman. "Help" has no about. It has a "Check for Updates", but that doesn't tell me my current version. Only what new version is available. My response; a genuine feeling of frustration and anger.
The idiotic full screen save menu that forces you to click a few more times to save on the computer instead of a cloud service (I'm sure that's some sort of dark pattern...) is even worse, however.
Edit: here's a good rant about that latter one: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11058/save-me-from-shit-u...
Everything coming out of MS the last 5 years has been thoroughly underwhelming, but the UI development and user infantilization takes the cake.
Just image everyone in your company saves any document they opened automatically. How would these even look like after 1-2 weeks?
The decision processes at Microsoft cannot be explained by cocaine alone anymore...
Sorry for the rant, let's just say I understand your frustration...
> Just image everyone in your company saves any document they opened automatically. How would these even look like after 1-2 weeks?
The essence of using autosave is separating storing from sharing the information. In an office suite, autosave should save your changes locally, so that a power outage won't wipe your edits.
This doesn't mean that other people will see those changes as soon as they're made; that's why you also create a "share" or "publish" command that will make them available. Developers got it and enjoy it in their version control systems, so why is it so difficult for them to understand that end users would benefit from the same safeguards? The first commandment of UI design is "treat all user input as sacred", yet so few developers respect it.
[1] http://quoteitup.com/quote/beUH/jef-raskin-the-system-should...
For example, we have a traveling expense document that is exported as pdf after people made their input. Since quite some time people can see what the last employee has been up to. Don't get me wrong, that can get quite funny. Possibly ad breach of confidential information, but meh...
We have no backend to publish to for these documents. It is just the boring file server.
There are certainly weaknesses in this particular workflow, but I would argue that it is quite common.
A shared folder in a server doesn't separate saving from sharing, but that's a fault of shared folders, not autosave. The popular storage models for end users are utterly broken, but developers don't care because they don't need to endure it, they've got their superior tools that they keep to themselves.
A file has a name and a path, analogous to conventional storage systems. Putting it in a proprietary system like SharePoint or a Teams channel, to stay in the MS world, has other disadvantages.
I am giving them the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes I think the main goal for these "improvements" is vendor lock in, especially if the topic is around blurring file locations or URLs.
Access rights and relevancy of files is indeed something most alternatives organize better, but content tagging doesn't really work in my experience, because users just don't do it. So the only information about a files content remains the filename and the path.
Since those are fundamental concepts for data organization in most computer systems, it is advantageous to convey these ideas to the user and from my experience this is not that much of a hurdle.
Sure, a network share has disadvantages and without a competent clean up crew it quickly gets convoluted. But that is a problem all other systems have as well. So to improve the current situation, solutions should build upon file systems.
And asking the user if he really wants to save the file is probably just a good idea. If he ignores the message and throws away some work, he has learned a valuable lesson. Users on every knowledge level go through that experience at some point anyway. I think users suffer far more from most proprietary solutions for data exchange that is distinct from copying some files from A to B.
I agree proprietary lock-in is a pain and a huge risk, but I'm talking about fundamental storage models here, not particular implementations (where the problem is lack of interoperability, not the storage model; a proprietary file system doesn't create lock-in, because there are open standards to get your data out of it).
The best content storage model for end users I've seen is the wiki, where you get content versioning for free, although it doesn't separate storage from publication. A wiki where you could keep local separate branches of content would be ideal, but a.f.a.i.k. the only wiki system using that model (shareable local copies) is the Smallest Federated Wiki[1], and it hasn't gained much tracktion.
[1] https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
> And asking the user if he really wants to save the file is probably just a good idea. If he ignores the message and throws away some work, he has learned a valuable lesson
See, that's the kind of comment explaining why users secretly (or openly!) hate computers and think they go after them. Too many developers creating their software are actively disrespecting user's work and their time, even decades after human-computer interaction specialists found the best practices for caring about the user and making their life easier.
We computer people invented the concept of saving as an abstraction over the fact that unless what is in RAM gets written to disk, it is at risk of being lost once the computer is turned off or the program closes. The end user should never, ever have to worry about what is in RAM or on disk. The end user should expect computer documents to behave the way physical documents behave. Physical documents, and the changes people make to them, persist even after you stop working with them. We should go one better than the real world and autosave not just the document, but a complete undo history for that document.
It's not infantilizing to make your program conform to the expectations of real-world logic. It's bewildering to the user when your program does not.
I should also mention that there isn't even a Help menu anymore, because nobody would have a need for help with anything in Microsoft Office, right? You can still get help if you know about F1 though.
Although maybe it's fixed now.
The first one has a JSON flat file to store settings and you have to dig the documentation or compare the original file to change something (this level of discoverability is akin to reading the source code but it's an electron map, not dwm). Later on they bolted some kind of semi-automatic UI on top of it but it doesn't help me figuring out shortcuts and whatever settings I want to change/find.
The Windows Terminal Preview config opens another flat JSON file in notepad. At least in VS I can used the editor to navigate the file :D.
I thought the preferences menu under the edit menu vs under the tools menu in linux/windows was ridiculous but those two examples are worse.
Configuration is not like building things. Unless I'm truly tinkering for fun, I usually have a goal in mind. Like, sure, I have to mess around with program code and structured data formats all the time. I'm pretty good at it. But when I want to [re]configure something about my IDE or terminal, I want to be in and out as fast as possible and basically not have to think about it; configuration is a brief diversion not an end in itself.
I'd be less entitled and ranty if these were CLI/unix internal tools we're talking about. The convention with that ecosystem is config files and manpages to learn how to use them. Given that convention and the resources of the OSS community it would be silly to insist on GUIs there (though some do exist!). But Windows Terminal and VS are graphical programs that are made by a GUI-first software company with basically unlimited resources. Come on.
Also, re: backup and restore, "export" or "store configuration at so-and-so path" are far better options--see iTerm2's config export/sync-via-dropbox-or-whatever option; coupled with that terminal's excellent preference UI, it makes config management a breeze, and that software was mostly developed by one person!
/rant
I love iTerm and use it daily, but I would never call their checkbox soup "excellent".
But more importantly, educating users is not the job of app developers, and any attempt to make it so will fail miserably. If you want to make an app that people will use, then you need to make one that suits your customers needs. The real ones, who already exist. You can’t make an app that tries to transform customers into something you that want them to be, and expect it to succeed.
Some users just don't want to learn. It's the reason why I always get a phone call when [Thing I've tried to sit down and teach to grandma] needs to be done.
You're on to something when talking about consistency and following design language. Building a good UI takes skill and thought into making the design intuitive enough that if it comes to it, anyone can figure it out.
I think you can have a UI that is both usable for both sides of the bell curve, it just takes skill and testing.
100% agree. It took my grandma about two weeks with a tablet to figure out by herself how to look up oil prices in the web browser. It was the first device she ever used that was more powerful than an old Nokia mobile phone and her first contact with the internet. We never taught her what a web browser was or how to use it.
Meanwhile my mother used a laptop and smartphone for years with everything that goes with it, and uses these devices mainly to complain about how they don't do exactly what she wants. It just has to work the first try or the computer is broken, there's no inbetween for her.
Grandma usually trades oil contracts by phone? Or Grandma heats with oil and needs a refill? Or Grandma has a salad dressing factory? Or...
I switched to lilypond for typesetting music, I guess it may not be the right option for those who actually compose (I mostly typeset classical pieces to add fingering and obtain a better quality than the cheaply layouted scores that are published today have, unfortunately guitar sheet music is way behind the standards that are set in classical piano music, and just retyping things in lilypond improves the quality by A LOT).
In some cases I have worked with the same people for years, guiding them (IT-wise), being friends with them, watching them do domain-specific things that require good mental abilities... but also watching them misuse or fail to use software despite my repeated efforts to train them.
If you want to reach the greatest audience and also reduce support time/cost, then we _should_ be catering to the most ignorant users. But as I say elsewhere, we should have two interfaces - one for normal/advanced users, and one for the really low performing users.
It’s easy to watch a lesson or demonstration and think you get it only to discover some time later that you didn’t really understand what was being shown. A much better approach is to walk people through performing the task themselves rather than passively watch it being done. They will be much more likely understand the task and to remember how to carry out the task – and retain that knowledge for a longer time.
In that context, I think your assessment that 'old GUIs' were more user-friendly is very rose-tinted. Back in the early 90s when those GUIs were everywhere, personal computers came with documentation, usually still on paper, because the devices weren't even user friendly enough that a typical purchaser could power on the computer and view documentation without help. And even then, these purchasers were a tiny subset of the population, typically with high educational achievement.
This was a time when public opinion hadn't even yet tilted in the direction of considering computer literacy to be a skill useful outside of an office building. Computer skills were definitely (and even to some degree still is) something people would list on a resume.
Consider the introduction of iOS. Windows Mobile had more features, more applications, was available on cheaper phones, and was entrenched in the business market at the time. It even followed traditional Windows design patterns, and applications often had a menu bar, as to your preference. They had plenty of documentation, and a link for 'Help' was always just a click away inside the Start Menu.
So, why was iOS so successful? It wasn't because power-users like you and I switched over. Many power-users mocked the device. It wasn't successful for including user documentation, it didn't and still doesn't. iOS was successful because it could be used by people who were unable or unwilling to read and follow documentation before using such a device.
Computer literacy is certainly a good academic initiative, but it won't help you make successful software for the mass market. The vast majority of casual computer users won't pursue educational endeavors to use your application. Most will opt for an alternative that doesn't require it, or they won't use it at all.
You should always consider the intended audience for your application. In our information bubble we sometimes lose an accurate perspective of the skills of the general public. This is of little consequence for many applications, but if your application is truly intended for the general public, like a government website, it's something that might need to be highly prioritized.
Educating users costs money as well. From business perspective, no one is going to spend that money.
Mistake #1: Windows != GUI
Apple has/had another design language. But Apple got it more right. Ironically Steve Jobs fulfilled Bill Gates mission (~a computer in household) with the iPhone.
Mistake #2: "If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic level."
No and no. It becomes clearer that this is exactly the hard part: figuring how to provide value to users without telling them they are too stupid to use our software and we need to educate them first. If you build the iPhone it really would be just another Windows device. ;)
> Which also means that when something goes wrong you have no control over fixing it -- you're simply fucked
You are not. In the end, all a user tries to do is changing a value in a database.
An iPhone or an iPad is just a device for consumption. It completely hides, if not locks you out of, the underlying workings of the device, meaning that you learn nothing and you create nothing.
Absurd. There are a huge number of tasks for which, if I'm only allowed one device to accomplish it, I'd definitely take an iPad over a laptop. Practically anything involving photography or recording video or audio, for instance. Many sorts of art. Music, depending on the task. If allowed an external keyboard it's better than a laptop for writing in some environments—the decoupled device & keyboard allow for more flexibility in arranging print outs, books, and any other stuff you need.
For some of it an iPhone, even, is better than a laptop or desktop. And it fits in my pocket. A laptop doesn't.
Slab-of-glass type computers are worse at some things than traditional desktops and laptops but wildly better than "normal" computer at a ton of others, especially given space or budget constraints. The statement that tablets and phones are consumption devices to a greater degree than other computers is very wrong and I can't believe it keeps popping up so often, after all this time.
[EDIT] I also object to dividing consumption and creation so neatly. Consumption is part of all sorts of creation tasks. Maybe most. When you look something up on SO has a switch flipped and now you're "consuming" rather than "creating"? If I'm reading a recipe on my tablet is that consumption? What if I'm cooking at the same time? Scanning back through a video on some home improvement project to check my work while I'm working? For that matter, add "basically anything that involves doing things in the real world" to the list of creative activities for which I'd take a phone or tablet to assist me, both as a relevant-media display device and as a tool itself, over a laptop. I use my iPhone a ton just about any time I do actual doing-real-world-stuff work.
When I was younger I thought it would be cool to DJ with a three-iPad setup-- two ipads acting like a turntable/CDJ and a third acting as a mixer. Nowadays, putting on my performer hat, I would hate that setup as I feel like I would be fighting with the touch interface. I'll take real buttons and knobs on dedicated hardware any day of the week.
I find the iPad great for drawing (with Pencil) and anywhere from pretty good to great for all kinds of other creative work, especially compared to a PC/laptop with either having only its out-of-the-box equipment (no big add-ons), which is to say it's excellent for hobbyists, small-timers or newbies to a whole bunch of creative fields. But of course I can also watch Netflix on it, and it's nearly useless for dev work except as a terminal device, so... that makes it consumption-focused while PCs are creation focused I guess? I mean I've been using PCs since the DOS days so I'm not some touchscreen native, but the assertion just doesn't make any sense to me, yet it keeps coming up in developer circles. I don't see them (primarily-touchscreen portables) in my life and the way I see them used by others as any more consumption-focused than PCs, really, they're just good at a bunch of stuff PCs aren't so great at, and bad at some stuff PCs are good at. I do not understand the source of that claim, a single bit, unless "consumption" is "anything that's not computer programming".
On a PC, just by being bored you can learn quite a bit about how the OS works; you can access devtools from a browser; you can learn tons and tons by trying to get some old/obscure game to work; you can google "how to make a game" which would probably lead you to a download page for python, which you could install and start writing some scripts; you could easily stumble upon Blender and some tutorials and start 3D modelling.
Or if you want Python https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pythonista-3/id1085978097
I think that's only true in a literal sense. For many people, it's untrue in a practical sense, and those people live in a practical world.
I think a better conclusion is "if these skills are important, design software which aids in and rewards the development of them."
If your software is designed with some UX which is hyper-optimized to get users to do some small handful of tasks you thought of, instead of designed as a simple tool they can understand, then it shouldn't be surprising if users don't learn to do anything except those tasks.
Best case it’s an 80/20 situation. Few design teams have a mandate or desire to dive into the 20%. They love to remove “distractions” and usually don’t understand that tasks that happen once a quarter are often as important as tasks that are done 3x per day.
I’ll use iMovie as an example. It’s a well-designed, great app and incredibly intuitive... if you are on a path/experience that was designed for you. My then-5 year old could make shockingly well done little movies without the ability to meaningfully read. But... if you need to step off the path, it’s a cliff.
When I was in college, in the 90s, I worked at a big box retailer selling computers and similar gear. Their ERP was an AS/400, text based system that was not at all intuitive, but with about 30 minutes of training was usable. After a few weeks was a trusty tool that could be adeptly and efficiently wielded. The difference was that it was a tool, and the practitioners of the tool could make changes to how the tools were used to get shot done.
Snapchat’s philosophy is interesting because it’s designed for people who already know how to use Snapchat. It actually increased the social aspect a bit because most everyone probably has a story or two of being shown how to do something by someone else.
Very true. Just last night a person I've been on a few dates with showed me that they apparently added multiplayer games to snapchat quite awhile ago and I had no idea they existed til then.
> [recommendations in the article]
> * Little or no navigation required to access the information or commands required to solve the problem
> * Few steps and a minimal number of operators
> * Problem resolution requiring the respondent to apply explicit criteria only (no implicit criteria)
I think this is telling us what to do. Stop hiding things away behind hamburger menus and replacing interactive, rich dialogs with a chain of single-choice dialogs. Don't hide context or make assumptions. I've heard designers say things like "you should have a maximum of one decision on the screen at once" and "you should provide a maximum of two choices for each decision." But why? It's just more steps, more hidden assumptions, longer dialog chains for the user to navigate and more complicated logic (e.g. handling "go back" in the middle of one of these chains). But hey, I don't have a fine art degree so my input about a good user experience is worthless.
I’m not sure if that is praise or criticism.
Don't know if it actually pays off positively for them, because I also find it confusing. But there's definitely been many moments of "Whoa, You can add a friend that way? You can do this by holding that button down?" etc
But it's a nice counterargument to all the 'make the UI for the minimum viable user' thinking. It's a demonstration that if people care even a little bit, they can figure even such terrible, undiscoverable UI like Snapchat out.
Then they added stories and a contact list, and then they had to make money with the platform and things truly went to shit. That being said, it's not nearly as clunky as instagram's clone. I'd say regular users have gotten used to the death by thousand cuts at this point, like Latin evolving into vulgar Latin then later romance languages, and totally incomprehensible to someone who's just downloaded the app.
Computer programming is like building, modding, or repairing your car — you can learn but it’s an activity done basically only by hobbyists and professionals.
Troubleshooting computer issues is like car maintenance. Everyone can fill the tank with gas, most people can change a tire, fewer can change their oil, and fewer still can jump a battery.
The bad news is that a lot of people will never attain the formal operational stage, and what is even worse is that the percentage of people that do is falling.² The results of this study are not surprising.
The take-away should be that it is pointless and counter-productive to try to dumb down the user interface for applications in domains that require a high level of cognitive development. No amount of picture icons and hamburger menus is going to make up for an inability to reason abstractly. What it will do is make it impossible for anyone to ever use the application efficiently.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive... ² https://oneofus.la/files/flynn2018.pdf
I guess the equivalent in computing would be spreadsheets? You can automate and build awesome things but god help you if you wanna move it somewhere else
Similarly with spreadsheets. Sure, they get ugly. But they allow to get work done better and faster that it would be otherwise (if it was done at all). The alternative usually involves finding a ready-made domain-specific application and adjusting your (or your company's) workflow to it, or pestering someone to make it for you, both of which are frequently bad trade-offs. It takes time to arrange, often siloes you off your data, you have lots of irrelevant stuff to learn besides your task, and it prevents you from iterating on your workflow. I'd say the last one - iteration on workflow - is the biggest source of Excel (ab)use. Hard to lock down your process in a domain-specific tool if the details of that process are fuzzy and subject to change.
Everyone may not need to know how to repair their car, but to perform basic, routine maintenance on it and to learn driving technique as intended is something that, when neglected, can cause major inefficiencies.
Economics 101 says just the opposite, that you create inefficiencies when you don’t specialize. Why is car maintenance anything that everyone should know and not plumbing, electrical work or carpentry?
That's simply bullshit. If you specialize on only installing tires on cars, but not removing them, you have specialized more than a business that swaps your tires, but you have created massive inefficiency by requiring your customers to somehow move around vehicles without tires for you to install tires for them.
There are particular circumstances where specialization increases efficiency, and there are (obviously) other circumstances where specialization decreases efficiency, so it's nonsensical to just say that specializing is always the more efficient choice, which is why all your analogies fail: You use an example where specialization (arguably) increases efficiency, then you completely fail to explain how computer skills fall into the same category as that example, and then you conclude that therefore it is in the same category.
Every specialization is about knowing the level of integration and specialization.
Well, then that's simply the claim that markets solve all problems optimally ... which is equally bullshit?
> Every specialization is about knowing the level of integration and specialization.
So ... specialization is always better, except when it's not? Yeah, duh!? How exactly does that help us with determining what the right level of integration and specialization is?
On a broader scale that’s the entire idea of the value chain.
People are expected to know SOMETHING about cars because they are frequently a huge expense that you are required to expend to be able to exist in a lot of places.
Econ 101 in this case assumes that time and money are fungible in any particular increments and that the money they earn doing whatever they are optimal at is greater than the cost of the specialists services.
Example someone making 20 bucks an hour needs a professional service that requires 3 hours of work for a professional at a cost of $900 learning to do so ineffeciently for 5 hours then spending 6 hours seems like a, huge waste but consider.
- Just because their labor is worth $20 an hour doesn't mean that they they can trivially in the context of their current obligations convert a day off into extra pay right when they need it.
- 11 hours x 20 hours will furnish 1/4 of the money required. Even given an immediate alternative it will require 45 hours of additional work.
Incidentally if you own a home you probably ought to learn at least enough basic maintenance to fix simple things.
This is often effecient in practice.
Every time you go out to eat, you are paying a markup over something you can do yourself - do you go out to eat?
Would it be more efficient for me to cut my own grass and maintain my yard on the weekend than pay someone else since I can’t convert that time I save on the weekend to cash - of course. But that’s time I can spend with my wife or relaxing. I also haven’t washed my own car, preferring to go to the car wash since I got my first real job out of college.
My maternal grandfather was a “man’s man” he built his own house, could fix cars, he took his pigs to the slaughterhouse and had a ranch with cows that he maintained until close to the time he died. On the other hand, my father isn’t as mechanically inclined, always looked up to his father in law and it took him years of convincing that it wasn’t emasculating to pay someone to do something that you’re not good at.
Doing a bit of maintainence can take you 2 minutes, having it done by an expert could take 2-3 man hours once all the inefficiences are considered (getting to the mechanic's shop, setting a price, waiting for things to be done, all the overhead of running and advertising the shop).
Based on my experience with talking to clients and observing them while doing B2B, if the average office worker had decent Excel and Googling skills (let alone the skills of the average vim user) they'd save a couple of hundred hours a year.
Still, numeracy is not being able to multiply a bunch of 3-digit numbers on a piece of paper. Numeracy is primarily knowing which numbers to multiply, or add together, or subtract from each other to learn something you need, and that you can do this in the first place.
On the simple side of things, is your check engine light on, are you dragging your air dams, are your lights on, do your tires have any tread.
Slightly more complex, recognizing that your car is over heating, recognizing burning oil, brakes on the wear pad.
More complex, is the suspension connected to the body?
What's scary is the number of ride share drivers (and taxi cabs) that continue (are allowed to?) drive with some of these serious issues happening. even in states like California with vehicle inspections.
Most problems with cars (except maybe tread), you get some combination of an indicator light, something smells funny, sounds funny, or your car drives differently. In either case, you either take it to a mechanic or if it can’t be driven, you get it towed.
Where a single light can mean everything from you're losing 10% fuel efficiency to your car will seize and light on fire if you keep driving for 10 minutes.
Relevant fact: there were on average 152,000 car fires each year in the U.S.A and most crashes do not result in fire.
But, without cursory knowledge of car issues, that decision is unwise, negligent at worst. A car breaking down in the center of traffic has negative externalities. A car fire (152k/year) has negative externalities. A tire or brake failure resulting in an accident has negative externalities.
Even the seemingly innocuous check engine light being on from emissions equipment has negative externalities.
Your expertise is someone else’s “undifferentiated heavy lifting” no matter what field you’re in.
Plus the point is that as cars became more ubiquitous, once esoteric skills became the norm, such as checking oil, filling up gas. At some point the baseline has to advance.
Yes and no. On the one hand, as early cars become more common, more people had to deal with them. But on the other hand, cars became simpler to use over time.
Tinkering with your car used to be a hobby of many people and a necessity. These days, there's not much user servicing left. (I don't even know whether you still have to manually check the level of oil? Don't they have sensors for that these days?)
Gas station pumps have also become much easier to use. It requires some intention and a minimum amount of skill to overfill your tank these days. Similar considerations apply to using computers.
Starting your spreadsheet by typing something in the DOS prompt used to be how things were done. These days, vastly more people are expected to be at least somewhat familiar with spreadsheets--it's no longer something to highlight in your CV--but starting the program used to do so has become simpler.
Similar countervailing developments have been common since at least the industrial revolution. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskilling
Most cars do have sensors for this, but they often fail, and even if they're working fine, tell you at a warning level, not at a full level. If you want to be a prepared driver you'd check your fluids regularly, but especially before long trips; The bonus is that the sensors can't tell you that your oil is prematurely dirty, so just by looking at it, you get more information.
This reminds me of Obama recommending people check their tires; yes, modern vehicles have tpms, but if they heed the warning, it often doesn't come on until a tire is significantly low ~20%.
Speaking of which, that’s yet another thing we pay for other people to do. If it’s a trip longer than about five hours we are flying or if we are being cheap and it’s not too far (around 6 to 7 hours) and if possible, taking the MegaBus.
Then there is the fact that about half those places specialize in making up stuff that is wrong with dumb peoples cars to rip them off.
Or even rental car companies.
If we put our minds to it, these days we can often make sensors that are much better than humans for these kinds of applications.
Btw, you are talking about the former US president Obama? Seems a bit weird for him to care about car maintenance?
Why wouldn't the President care about the safety of millions of potential death traps driving to work daily?
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug...
Estimates were that 25% of American tires were underinflated, wasting 2.8 billion gallons of gasoline every year.
Wow, -2 in 40 minutes. I knew unpopular but is it that controversial a view??
That said, I know how to do all of these things, I actually service my car and a motorcycle myself despite the apartment complex's "rules", but I think for a lot of car owners they're not in "safe" space to do their own maintenance. There's also the up front cost of buying tools. I think a lot of car owners in similar situations are relegated to taking the car to a shop for simple repairs as a result. Any advice?
Being able to transform money into convenience is a great benefit of living in a modern inter-connected society. But it's only great while it lasts, and relying on always having this ability is a risky move. When my parents ran into hard times they raised and slaughtered hogs. When things got better we stopped. I don't think I'd be alive today if they didn't have that know how.
If the hard time is temporary, that’s what credit is for. If it is systemic, I’ve got bigger fish to fry - downsizing our house, getting job training, moving near a bus line to save money on car insurance, etc.
It’s just like the BS “Latte Factor”. People are not unable to save for retirement because of $6/day Latte. It’s usually because they have high fixed costs relative to their income.
As many dry cleaners that I see even in the less affluent parts of the city, people are able to afford to do that too.
Most less affluent people who do own their own home (as well as many who could afford it) do cut their own grass.
On the other hand these jobs do take space in my life and in my mind. It is questionable whether we should "force" people to do simple car maintenance. Our society runs on division of labour and everybody places their cutover to experts somewhere else. You say they could benefit a lot from gaining some mechanical understanding of their car's operation. And I feel the same. But they may wonder why they should learn a skill that takes time away from other things important to them.
Sure I may question how they spend their time. But now we've moved away from how knowing basic maintenance is good for you to a more general outlook on life. Watching a tutorial will improve one's future life. But we can't say that watching a car maintenance tutorial will be the right thing. Maybe it's a tutorial on Excel? Which would be more in line with the topic of the article anyway.
So I agree with you in general but not in specifics :-)
Current subthread started with this: "Yes, unpopular opinion these days, but car owners should really know how to do at least the bare minimum of basic car maintenance"
It's probable that Bezos has to give zero fucks beyond what brand he prefers. People living in their car are probably just praying it doesn't break down. In between there is a giant middle ground that composes 80% of the car owning population whose benefit derived from car know how is inversely proportional to their wealth.
Most car owners should learn the basics of how their car works and how it is maintained even if they intend to outsource that labor to others just so they aren't trivially taken advantage of. If we assume that MOST people aren't born into wealth most people could stand to learn the basics during the time when they have more time than money and then they could make productive use of this know how later.
I'm not sure how you can even argue this point.
I don't think your existential proof is a good one. It's like proving Cigarettes are OK by noting that billions use and only millions die.
Most Americans are as knowledgeable about how to operate their automobil e as they are about software. That is, not very.
Making a pencil is a highly fragmented industrial process, even at the 19th century level. Just making the "lead" is quite sophisticated.
There is much satisfaction in being a maker - or at least being more than just a consumer.
While I find "wizard" interfaces frustratingly slow to use, I think they are a better approach for many users. Here's a silly but not so terrible idea for an email interface, wizard-style:
1. "You have a new email from bob@example.com. Would you like to open it? [Open] [Save for Later]"
2. (opened) (display email). "Do you want to reply to Bob now? [Reply] [Do Something Else]"
etc. etc.
This kind of interface could be handled by anyone, and it would probably work well for people with different physical or visual challenges.
Anything more complicated than this is just beyond the willingness or capability of most people to handle. What's really scary is that some people operate their cars much like they operate a computer - doing unnecessary ritualistic things that have no benefit or produce the desired outcome as a side-effect, leaving some systems in a permanent state when they should be enabled/disabled at different times, and so on. The tendency is to think that people are just generally incredibly stupid (unwilling to learn, not incapable); but perhaps it's just that our UI approach needs to actually be two approaches - one for users, and one for refusers.
You're making the mistake thinking users are carefully operating their machines with a purpose. It's more like being surprised by a spider, clicking on anything that moves and if it starts bonging click shut down and try again later before you delete your life.
/12 years tech support and have a family.
"can you read what is on the screen right now"
"There is nothing on the screen!"
"there is a box on the center of your screen with words, please read them"
"OH that box.."
In my experience, any kind of task which involves giving people instructions is extremely frustrating when done over the phone; there's just too much context missing, so you have to start being extra precise to compensate - but then, most regular people aren't used to being talked to with precision, so they start getting annoyed and push back.
The most common example I can think of is trying to explain someone over the phone how to get somewhere, when you know the lay of the land but they don't. A lot of frustration and useless info gets exchanged before they're even able to communicate you where they are.
I think the crux of the problem is secretly hidden here, though. Many creators overestimate how interested other people are in what they made. The complexity of using your solution is always at odds with how painful the problem I have is. If your solution isn't easy to figure out, it can be easier to just solve the problem in an other way.
It does make me wonder about the sustainability of technological growth however. If there is such a small portion of folks that can use all of this new tech, how far reaching can it really be? Will this divide begin to shrink? Or stay static as one small portion of the population drifts further and further away from the other...
End of the day, complex processes get completed when offered to the public, and computer based processes are generally the norm. People somehow get hunting licenses, navigate complex DMV processes, book transportation, and get passports, even when they are not above average IQ.
I think if you asked these questions based on end goal rather than method, you’d see smaller numbers of level 0/1 people.
It sounded to me like the assessment was framed around PC use — most people don’t use PCs! I’ve seen scenarios where complex workflows delivered in social services scenarios (where education, literacy and language competency are an issue) where getting tasks completed in mobile (which is ubiquitous and often more complex) is significantly better than a similar complexity task (travel vouchers) with a professional audience on PC.
If less than 5% of the population is capable of performing complex tasks, society would break down. Something is wrong with the assessment of complexity or questions asked.
(I'm sure you've met people who are the inverse.)
Even online chat support is pretty lackluster and puts a lot of work on the user. At an old job of mine, IT wouldn't even mess around with trying to troubleshoot a ticket going back and forth chatting or emailing. They'd just remote in to your workstation and fix the problem, same thing a concierge at a hotel would do with their keyboard and mouse rather than you struggling through booking on hotels.com and managing an online chat.
The example of a difficult task was to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email message”. Many of the other examples given are email related tasks.
If you meter and study Office app use, you’ll find that features like this are rarely invoked. For the example above, Where I have studied behavior on significant user populations, I would guess that 5% of users book a meeting room resource in any 30 day period, and only 2-3% do so more than once in a 30 day period. The numbers will vary in some populations, but usually you see 80% of the booking done by a small number of people (managers and admins).
The problem with this is that the study is looking at a narrow range of office worker tasks and applying them to the public at large. It’s an assessment of MS Office skill sets across the population, not ability to perform complex tasks.
There may be more depth in the paywalled study, but this article didn’t surface it.
All it takes is one of her friends or influencers to explain it, and viola, no longer allergic to technology.
¹ https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
I also don't drive a car so this skill is mostly useless to me much like some people don't need any more computer skill than just being able to send emails and read websites.
That instinct is getting less useful as every application tries hard to abandon basic concepts in favor of being intuitive, it may lower the bar somewhat (I don't believe that), but it definitely makes applications harder to actually use for people who used to "get it".
A lot of the times UIs try to hide complexity by making it “easy” to do common tasks, but the underlying complexity is still there and rears its ugly head when you inevitably bump into an edge case, then you have to learn all that complexity (or as is often the case - rage quit).
A good example is Amazon software in general - from their shopping software to AWS console - all great if you’ve done it before and follow their guided path, but if you want to understand what will _actually_ happen or to do a specific edge case well then you better have a lot of nerves and patience.
Seen a person actually brought to tears by a shopping experience were she fell outside of a happy one click sale path and had to do some amendments, with some significant money on the line. She just felt powerless because suddenly an “easy” experience turned bad and now she had to understand _all_ the minutia around sellers, shipping and refund policies.
Not a pretty sight.
Had the underlying principles been a little less convoluted, and actually exposed, then a user could successfully navigate even some edge cases as then he would have at least some tools at his deposal.
Right now UIs tend to drift to “click and pray” category, where you identify what’s the several common scenarios and just cover those.
The way I see it, we suffer from a bad case of "worse is better" here. The amount of utility a piece of software provides can be to first order expressed as (Number of users * Average productivity * Average result of the results of using the software). Unfortunately, the revenue of a typical SaaS vendor is proportional only to the number of users. Dumbing down the interface and trimming features increases the number of users, but kills the right part of productivity and result utility distributions. In other words: more people doing less with worse tools.
I've personally observed (and had to help) many times where an otherwise extremely intelligent person seems to completely lose his/her brain upon being seated in front of a computer, and wonder why that is; these people can be experts in various other fields involving significant mental ability (e.g. maths, physics, chemistry), but when given the simplest of tasks to perform on the computer, like those in the article, all common sense and rational thinking seemingly disappears completely. Most people in the advanced category probably know that a computer is "a stupid machine", but could it be the "magical" nature of computing, and how it's often sold as, that completely destroys their expectations?
Relatedly, I'm pretty sure the stories at http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ are all true.
I saw this in college student who had straight As in every classes failed the programming exam ..because of a gcc flag. Student was just not aware of some synta and got stuck.
Those are trivial skills that take a matter of minutes to learn, and for which there are countless step by step guides available online. I'm certain that car mechanics have had this exact same conversation with the nouns changed about. How can somebody who is an expert in e.g. computer science, not manage to take a few minutes to learn how to change their fluids or pads? Skills that would not only improve their independence and knowledge but also save them thousands of dollars over time? And indeed even when given illustration of how to do so, some people just seem to be arguably voluntarily incompetent. I think it's the same thing with computers as I've observed the exact same thing, as I imagine everybody has. Some people just don't want to learn things outside their domain, and seem to become voluntarily incompetent when facing those problems.
But to get to the real point, you are talking about two different issues as if they are one and the same. The car discussion is about not being interested in learning some things because you can just pay someone to do it while you do something else that you enjoy more. That it is easy to learn has nothing to do with it.
The parent poster here is talking about intelligent people being unable to complete basic tasks on a computer, even though they are sincerely trying to learn how to do them and sometimes even having them explained in detail.
Framing it as "ignorance" and "voluntarily incompetent" is incorrect, I don't reject the knowledge of brake pad changing, I desire to avoid the work of brake pad changing. It doesn't need doing often, I don't have the tools and experience to do a good, quick, job (pneumatic wheel nut removers, or a car lift). I already have to get my car inspected annually (UK), and that's a perfect time for a garage to change things. Worse, if I screw something up by being inexperienced, I'm in trouble - I can't drive my car to a garage, and a tow would cost more than the work. Assuming I can afford it and am not on a tight budget, then were's the compelling reason to do it?
> improve their independence
An illusion. I can't legally run a car without a garage doing an annual inspection, I can't make my own brake pads. I don't become more independent by removing and replacing 20 wheel nuts.
> [improve their] knowledge
Brake pads need changing every ~24,000 miles, that's every 2 years of average mileage, or ~25 times you will use this knowledge in your adult motoring life. Rough numbers. (Electric cars with regenerative braking will reduce wear on brake discs and pads). Is that a priority thing to learn? The best available thing to learn?
But my point is not that it's a bad trade, my point is that framing it as "the only imaginable reason is wilful ignorance" is little more than a putdown, and it's wrong. There are other reasons. You're selling the Heinlein-ian "if you can't do Everything yourself, then you're not a Real Man(tm)" worldview with a slightly different wrapper on it.
There was a good post about this from foobiekr a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571481
I did a further degree (not tech) just a few years back at my local uni which put me more in touch with regular, non-techy young folk than I'd had for years. I was assured by everyone (despite their knowing that I'm a programmer) that the digital natives would run rings around me with their mad internet & computing skills. I've also done a fair bit of "Code Club" style volunteer teaching at a local library.
What I find is cohorts of young people most of whom have desktops covered in files not because they're intrinsically messy people, but because they have no idea how to manage files elsewhere (and would lose them if they tried). And whose internet-based research skills are no different from my 83 year old mother's. They're more confident, and hence more willing to try things, but no more knowledgeable. What intuitions growing up with computers has equipped them with mostly relates to a few narrow & specialised corporate interfaces (Facebook, Instagram et al).
Our educational institutions (here in Aus anyway) do a lousy job of teaching people to use computers. And our computing industry's approach to human factors is an unmitigated shitshow.
It's my observation that people who don't right click can't be taught to program. (half serious)
I wonder if this really lowered all the scores, because the test UI may have been very non-standard/outdated/etc. "Simulated software" could be literally anything and could have caused a bunch of confusion among people who are used to certain icons and usage patterns.
...or, as may as likely be the case, very "modern". I'm confident to say that I'm far in the "advanced user" category, also having been a developer for a few decades, and yet I still get perplexed often by UIs with lots of hidden functionality and confusing hieroglyphics instead of descriptive text.
Example (as a recent iPhone user): If I want to open an SMS from the lock screen notification I swipe right, if I want to clear or respond to the notification I swipe left then select from the options that appear, but if I swipe left from a little further across on the screen it opens the camera, from whence swiping right again switches to video or slow-mo instead of going back to the lock screen. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen gets a neat little toolbox thing with commonly used options, whether or not the phone is locked. Swiping down from the top brings up notifications if the phone is unlocked but doesn't seem to do anything on the lock screen (I guess because it already shows notifications?). Double-pressing the 'home' button gets you a list of open and recently-used apps, but double-tapping the same button without triggering the physical button gets you some empty tray thing at the top of the screen which I'm still not sure the function of (maybe makes it easier to swipe down and get to notifications?)
This is random and fiddly enough for someone who writes software as a day job. I can see how it would be confusing as hell to anyone who doesn't usually use computers.
This is correct. Soft double tapping the home button cuts the display window in half, to make it easier to operate one-handed.
I have been using linux with gnome for years and I recently had to use a macbook. I wanted to change the sound settings so I opened the global app search thing and typed "Sound" got nothing so I searched "Audio" still nothing so I tried to find the settings app and tried "Settings" still nothing until I remembered the settings app is called "Preferences"
The OSX UI is not hard to use, its just not the same as what I had been using for years so even simple interactions seem difficult.
There was a time where apple and windows both seemed pretty stubborn with their semantics (trash vs. recycle bin, both do the same thing, solely for brand identity), but I think that must have died a couple versions ago.
A simple example would be the keybase android app which actually has a hamburger icon rather than 3 lines that we devs call 'a humburger', which in itself is supposed to represent a 'menu' of some sort. Classic.
As a dev, I loved it. As a UI for the masses...probably not the best idea.
If you want to be pedantic about this then using GMail or Outlook would probably have increased the scores some what, because a lot of people already know how to use them, but that probably doesn't answer the questions posed in the study since even most illiterate computer user can perform complicated tasks if they were shown how to do it (assuming they are of about average intelligence)
> An example of level-2 task is “You want to find a sustainability-related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October last year.”
This varies from easy to really, really hard depending on the specifics. I know that to do this in my specific condition I've had to do work to make it easier, and for my academic paper collection it still doesn't work consistently because Google OCR sowmtimes fails on older papers.
> The meeting room task described above requires level-3 skills. Another example of level-3 task is “You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.”
Has anyone here ever, EVER asked this question about a peer? Or even a client? I work with computers for a living and off the top of my head I'd say, "This is incredibly annoying to do using normal tools at my disposal."
I can't help but feel like a great deal of bias went into these categorization metrics, especially past Level 1, which artificially deflate and cluster the resulting users into a group with skills in data processing and analysis.
I'd surely believe that cohort is rare.
I think you're overthinking this. They aren't looking for a NN based solution with sentiment analysis.
from:John Smith sustainability -> results: 300
from:John Smith -> results: 800
37.5%
They're not expecting 5% of the population to train a word2vec model and produce prediction interval estimates. Just a simple back-of-the-envelope check.
The addition of the word "estimate" doesn't break the word budget and opens a lot of flexibility when it comes to unfamiliar tooling. Even if we ignore that, I reiterate: who has ever asked that question? The outlandishness of that question surely has at least as much responsibility as the obscurity of the UX in question or the general population's lack of education.
Personally I think most of the actual tasks have so little bearing on the reality of the average computer user's needs I can't say I'm surprised folks couldn't succeed. I also think this is a cognitive trap for a lot of folks here used to being skilled computer users; becoming eager to pontificate on why our unique insight is what's needed to "fix" the problem.
> One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages. This was difficult because the problem statement was implicit and involved multiple steps and multiple constraints. It would have been much easier to solve the explicitly stated problem of booking room A for Wednesday at 3pm, but having to determine the ultimate need based on piecing together many pieces of info from across separate applications made this a difficult job for many users.
This task isn't overly complicated. It's a task that computer-savvy people do on a regular basis, but it complex enough that it might trip up someone who can't use a computer well.
The self-similar biasing in this study us almost ridiculous.
I've spent upwards of a quarter hour in support calls or installfests trying to get someone to open a terminal window and issue 2-3 commands.
I routinely get asked for assistance with such technical tasks as: deleting spam email, restoring sidebars and menus, resetting font sizes, locating a window that's been hidden behind another foreground window. This from otherwise nominally self-sufficient, educated, professional adults.
Though in cases there are sensory and motor impairments involved.
The users themselves consider themselves proficient. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
I am always shocked at how many people respond to emails asking questions that are answered IN BOLD in the first paragraph of the email announcing a new tool or service.
The smartest people can sometimes miss the simplest of details.
Additionally, it seems to me that a lot of more recent interface designs seem to converge in the overall UX. Perhaps it's a result of standards like Material Design/Apple Guidelines and frameworks like Bootstrap and Semantic UI being published, but whatever the reason I think it has the benefit of reducing the learning curve for new products and making them easier to navigate. Even though this study concluded only 4 years ago in 2015, tech trends move fast and I personally think its measure of users' computer skills may be a bit dated in the context of today's tech landscape. This could just as well be my perspective from inside the bubble though, so here's your grain of salt with all of the above
People use, Slack, Facebook messenger, iMessage, AirDrop etc. Even kids often use DropBox to turn in work or whatever Google Docs uses.
For day to day use, my wife, son and I have a shared calendar that we update on our phone. If someone texts me a date, I just click on it to add it to a calendar.
Even when people do respond or send an email to people in their personal life, it’s usually to one person not a group. For groups, they will usually use a messaging app.
Even in modern Outlook on the Web, resource booking is buried in the UI — people don’t do it.
On top of that there were clear things such as menus, status bar tips, shortcuts and help docs that were to be found in the same place across programs, one would have to understand the system once and they would be generally fine across various programs.
Now, of course, I am not suggesting we go back to DOS but I am suggesting we take the good principles out of it and consider standardization. Windows had it right as well up to Windows 8 when they made a mess with the tiles and all the push towards a confusing mess (to this day, the settings app still doesn't have proper navigation).
driving skills
basic reading comprehension
the ability to think more than one step ahead
i know it’s not going to be a popular opinion, but yes most people are stupid.
No, most people are not stupid. Ignorant or unskilled about many subjects? Sure, but we all are.
Consider any speciality you like. There are those whom are Masters in it, fluent in its nuance and implication. And yet those same Masters are novices in most other domains. Are they stupid as well?
To put a fine point on it, consider this haiku:
Fishermen can fish,
But if you want a new roof,
Hire a carpenter. Human progress is neither
automatic nor inevitable...
Every step toward the goal
of justice requires
sacrifice, suffering, and
struggle; the tireless
exertions and passionate
concern of dedicated
individuals.[0]
0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/martin_luther_king_jr_164...
There are three generally used measures of central tendency:
- The mean: the "arithmetic average", sum of observations divided by count.
- The median: the central measure. The single value (or averaged pair) at the center point of an ordered listing.
- The mode: the most frequently occurring measure. Sort a set of values by frequency, and pick the most frequent instance.
Most people intend "mean" as "average", but that's not strictly the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
For our next pedant's corner post, we'll take on the distinction between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions.
If someone says something about the "average person", they are not talking about the mean, they are talking about the median.
Which is why democracy is so terrifying sometimes
But it isn't a good, useful, insightful comment.
There is no obvious link to the method of the study, but the text of the study seems to imply that these tasks are some variation of "How well can you perform a task on a slightly outdated version of Microsoft Office", which these days is not widely used outside of bureaucracies, and therefore likely to be unfamiliar to most people (even for _n_x-based programmers such as myself)
I suspect if you were to give users relatively advanced tasks related to social media, online shopping, or device configuration you would get much more positive results.
Computers are, by far, the most complicated machines that people are expected to be able to operate without any training whatsoever. Is that actually reasonable?
It really sticks out for me in the workplace. So many jobs require computer use. So many of the people in those jobs have no idea how to use them. They muddle through on a combination of habit and tribal knowledge, and call for help the moment anything different happens.
Consider jobs that require operating a car. It’s expected that someone hired for this job already knows how to drive. If they dont, they either won’t be hired or they’ll be required to complete training to learn how to operate this equipment.
Yet if you replace “drive a car” with “operate a computer,” usually they don’t care. Just try your best, and call IT for help.
Making intuitive interfaces that anyone can pick up and use is great, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like we try to take it to impossible places.
Now I do get the article itself is more about the level of computer literacy rather than the distribution, and that things like the mean skill might be way below where you think it is.
Part of my pet peeves about 'modern' systems is the indiscoverability. There was a glorious time in between the magic incantations command line and obscure multi key keyboard presses, and the wiz bang of of secret hand and finger gestures, where there was a universal compact meta system of menus and dialog boxes that while it could be extensive, allowed for browsing through all the command option in a discoverable way (and yes, I am over-glorifying).
We somewhere seem to have lost this. It is not about the command prompt vs menus vs gestures. It is about having a clear and universal road to discovery when you do not know what and how some command can be given.
Similarly, kids seem to figure out video game problems that would stump many adults.
Point being, people don't finish games because they get their fill of enjoyment before then. Many games I know start to feel like a chore after a time; some early on, others near the end. Unless there's a story you desperately want to see resolved - and many games these days ship without one - there's little reason to play a game once you mastered all the different mechanics it offered and seen most of the variety it featured. And then there's multiplayer, which wouldn't even count under this metric.
I propose a different one: people who play a game with nontrivial UI for more than 2 hours are evidence in favor. If the UI was a problem, they'd drop out sooner. After all, unlike software used at work, nobody forces you to play a game.
Of course. If 50% could do them, they wouldn’t be called “high computer-related skills”. Only 5% of the population has high athletics/cooking/etc. skills, too.
”and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.”
Seems like the definition of “medium-complexity” needs a small adjustment.
The message of this is “the medium is lower than you think it is”.
The good news is that what is considered medium goes up all the time. Transferring files between computers used to require meddling with ‘standard’ RS-232 cables and Kermit. Nowadays, 3-year olds regularly do it. Retouching photos used to be something for the 1% (and that likely is rounding up significantly). Now, 5-year olds can do it in seconds (taste still may need development at that age). Printing a map with the driving route from A to B? Child’s play (but they would wonder why you would take the trouble)
Rather ironic considering that the operating system they all use is actually named after this, for them, inscrutable abstraction.
Those guys at Apple knew what they were on to when they created iOS with its one app at a time paradigm, even if it is slowly adding all that complexity back in to the more recent versions.
First: virtually nobody using information technology has any idea of what it's really doing, or how to do anything beyond a very narrow bound of tasks. This includes the apparently proficient, and it's almost always amusing to discover the bounds and limits in knowledge and use of computers by the highly capable. Children, often described as "digital natives", are better described as "digitally fearless": they're unaware of any possible consequences, and tend to plunge in where adults are more reticent. Actual capability is generally very superficial (with notable exceptions, of course).
Second: if you're building for mass market, you've got to keep things exceedingly and painfully simple. Though this can be frustrating (keep reading), there's absolutely a place for this, and for systems that are used by millions to billions (think: lifts, fuel pumps, information kiosks), keeping controls, options, and presentation to the absolute minimum and clearest possible matters.
Third: Looking into the psychological foundations of intellectual capabilities and capacity is a fascinating (and frequently fraught) domain. Direct experience with blood relatives suggests any possible genetic contribution is dwarfed by experiential and environmental factors. Jean Piaget's work, and subsequent, makes for hugely instructive reading.
Fourth: If you are building for general use keep your UI and conceptual architecture as stable as possible. There simply is NOT a big win at UI innovation, a lesson Mozilla's jwz noted years ago. (Safe archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...) Apple's Mac has seen two variants of its UI in over 35 years, and the current OSX / MacOS variant is now older than the classic Mac UI was when OSX was introduced. Food for thought and humble pie for GUI tweakers.
Fifth: if you're building for domain experts, or are an expert user forced to contend with consumer-grade / general-market tools, you're going to get hit by this. The expert market is tiny. It's also subject to its own realms of bullshit (look into the audiophile market, as an example). This is much of the impetus behind my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", based in part on the OECD study and citing the Nieman-Neilsen group's article:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
(I've been engaged in a decades-long love-hate, and increasingly the latter, battle with information technology.)
Absent some certification or requirements floor (think commercial and general aviation as examples), technical products are displaced, and general-market wants will swamp technical users' needs and interests.
Not the primary reason, but anyway one of the reasons google+ failed.
It helps to rmember that as a rule, all but one mass-market social networking platform will fail. "Success" means "claiming the most mindshare". And if you're in the mass market, that means there's only one brass ring.
Any roadblocks or injuries, self-inflicted or otherwise, toward attaining that goal will not help you. Google+ certainly had much help inside and out in failing to attain that mark.
Paradoxically, this is why aiming for a specific niche can be a success, at least on its own terms. Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News qualify on this basis.
Facebook is now actively competing against not only other comers, but itself (WhatsApp, etc.) in various guises. A battle it will all but certainly, eventually, lose.
> An example of task at this level is “Delete this email message” in an email app.
But it's probably at least level 3 to realize that actually deleting email messages is impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.[0]
0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/arthur_c_clarke_101182
Common sense is the collection of
prejudices acquired by age eighteen.[0]
0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/albert_einstein_125365
No matter.
This study stopped counting at 3rd level with multipage forms basically... what’s a Linux terminal or git or swift or json/yaml configuration files if not highly advanced computer usage. 3rd, 4th, 5th, 100th, somewhere up there is a proficiency-level where you build your own computer in Minecraft for the fun of it and write languages and operating systems and these skills are learned and shared through open source more than anything.
I think if they had kept tracking the higher levels of proficiency by the time they got to open source users and developers there is a chasm between their ability to use computers to solve problems vs the 3rd-level person - data munging, web scraping, scripting, machine learning, advanced internet searching, bespoke software...
Some of the most successful accountants, CFO's, and stakeholders I have met would beg to differ.
> I think if they had kept tracking the higher levels of proficiency by the time they got to open source users and developers there is a chasm between their ability to use computers to solve problems vs the 3rd-level person ...
This is a straw man argument[0]. OSS != "higher levels of [computer] proficiency".
- domain registration
- web hosting
- put Wordpress on the hosting
- configure Wordpress
What matters most is solving the problem at hand, not what tools are used.
I'm just a random Internet account, trying to impart a bit of perspective. Do with it what you shall.
Are you taking the position that open source is heroic because it has garbage user experience?
Just look at the steps for setting up WordPress, it's a 101-level project on internet and web hosting. Reading and writing open source is a vital part of how people learn to use highly-advanced tools. I think this education is a really overlooked benefit of open source.
Given the focus drift that's accumulated from even modest popularity among some Linux distros, and meant not as a critical note, just a set of observations over my own several decades' experience, more technical Linux and BSD variants tend toward more technical users, whilst the more user-friendly distros (Mandrake, back in the day, Ubuntu, Mint, Cinnamon, etc.) tend to show a greater aversion to CLI and system tools, in favour of GUIs and the like.
Because commercial software does see massive network effects and attraction to mass markets, it tends to fall far lower on the user-capability curve.
This can also hit mass-market free software, with Chromium and Android (dismissing status as truly Free Software / Open Source) being cases that readily come to mind. The mechanism here is that these are aimed at advertising-promotion platforms, and hence, mass markets (Android devices number in the billions). Which is to say the polar opposite of intellectually-rewarding power-user tools.
It's not that the users' skills depend on the software licence, it's that licencing determines business interests and user-focus of the software developer.
Oh wait, you mean create an app for a taxi network?