It's unimaginable to the latter user that one would possibly have to "learn" how to use Google Docs having only ever been exposed to MS Word, while the former is completely lost because the menus have to be re-learned and all the possibilities available to them must be re-memorized.
The customers shit the bed and the change rolled back and an “unspecified contractor” was blamed for “an unauthorised change”.
I chose not to renew that one.
The Duo authentication app recently swapped the 'Accept' and 'Deny' buttons and it was unbelievably frustrating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269938
> Windows puts OK first Apple puts OK last
Gnome, iOS and Android followed Apples style, which influences Web Apps.
I work in IT and I can assure you that software developers have been doing their best for the past 20 years to live up to that expectation.
No meaningful indication what file was locked. No meaningful indication what was locking the file. The process simply stopped.
It got much better after Win 8 onwards.
So much this.
I can't quite put my finger on why I can't adapt. It's some combination of the facts that 1) there's often a huge dump of information, much of it so technical that it's useful only to the developers, 2) it's fairly rare that it offers a truly useful suggestion, and 3) many of the messages I encounter ask me to do something that makes things easy for the developer rather than the user (update the software, contact the manufacturer).
I think it's something we as an industry ought to work harder on, because I don't think the failure is only in the users. I think, although I can't explain exactly why, we're communicating very poorly.
In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can use a computer to do what they intended to do is age. Not IQ, not other mechanical or technical competence, not education, not cultural background, not linguistic aptitude, not reading speed, not creativity, not engineering or product design experience... mainly age.
(with outliers of course)
Computers, on the other hand, have interfaces that are vastly larger than any human brain could hope to contain. So they require exploration. This comes naturally to children, less so to fully matured adults, and is extremely rare in people middle-aged or beyond. So you get a line based on how old they were when they first got their hands on a computer.
I don't know the origin of this attitude.
From what I've seen, it isn't age, even IT people. Sorry.
I use the Apple, Google and Office Suite interchangeable, you don't need to relearn everything.
My dad wrote batch files when I was a kid. 98.bat give a list of items numbered 1-15. 3.bat then took you to a games directory wherein 99.bat gave you another numbered list list of 30+ games to choose from.
I memorized nearly every number on both menus before I could read.