I completely agree, but at the same time it's funny that you can take a two-year-old without any formal technology training at all, accidentally leave an iPad where they can get it, and before long they're showing you gesture commands you didn't even know about.
A small child has zero degree of caution. An older person knows they don't know and worries that ignorance will somehow break the device (permanently or temporarily).
A small child usually doesn't have a formal expectation of what they are trying to achieve, it's largely experimentation, maybe with the intent to discover fun or find games, but it's pretty basic. An older person often will have a very specific y'all they would like to accomplish while being aware they aren't totally sure the device can do it, and if it can, how exactly to get the device to do it.
I think these two inputs create a feedback loop that works to promote technology acquisition in children and retard it among older people.
As a parent of small children I regularly have to repair electronic devices that have been temporarily broken (e.g. different languages set, screens locked out, tablet storage filled by thousands of burst photos of the floor) and a small but growing collection of electronic devices that have been permanently broken (e.g. antennas pulled off of radios, keys pulled off keyboards, ports yanked out) by this lack of caution.
> An older person knows they don't know and worries that ignorance will somehow break the device (permanently or temporarily).
This may be rational learned behavior. If they don't have someone on hand to fix issues then with many interfaces it's surprisingly easy to get yourself stuck in a situation where it's not obvious how to get out.
By contrast, someone older but less experienced to technology comes to the iPad with a specific goal in mind. Unlike toddlers, whose whole mission in life is to form an image of what to them is a uniformly mysterious world, these are smart people who don't want to have to learn a whole new paradigm to do one thing. Not only can they not do the thing they want; worse, the motion and lights that accompany their attempts are not delighting to them as to the two-year-old, but somewhere between distracting and unpleasant.
I've observed this as well. The hardest part are the basic concepts. Examples:
- The idea of a "settings menu" itself is somewhat of an alien concept and mostly limited to devices with screens.
- Not all UI elements have obvious meanings if you aren't already used to them.
- The input device itself might be unfamiliar (mouse, keyboard, touchscreen) and the user's brain might be busy trying to understand how to interact with the device at all, let alone do useful things with it.
- Some users never learned the "why" or even the "what" of existing devices, only the "how" -- they don't understand concepts like "applications", they just follow very specific steps that someone laid out for accomplishing specific tasks. This makes it very difficult to discover functionality or adapt to a different UI, because they don't know what anything actually is in the first place.