How to help someone use a computer (1996)
pages.gseis.ucla.edu
pages.gseis.ucla.edu
This was true 26 years ago and unfortunately is it still true today. 26 years of wasted UIs.
Something is very wrong with our operating systems. I blame the obsessive-compulsive desire to wrangle the Internet into everything, instead of making the front-end operating system simply better for users.
People also can’t easily _describe_ the difference between a dog and a cat, but most can distinguish between a dog and a cat and have an intuitive understanding of the implications (e.g. they expect the right behavior/traits when they see a four-legged animal).
I think one problem is that the people who design computers and software must be perfectly precise when building them, and easily forget that this is inherently not how most people interact with most things.
If you can't describe the operation of putting a file in a folder and then sending that folder to your colleague for work purposes, and have faith that your work colleague will do the job as needed, then neither of you are ready to work with computers.
Yet, just today, in a company that has been operating for over 50+ years, I observed this very interaction occurring. 20 minutes of explaining how to wrangle files and folders, sheesh ..
This fault lays at the feet of operating systems designers, who have not fixed the faults in their abstractions before adding new ones. Don't even get me started on the Dropbox palaver ..
I was presuming you were referencing users who know how to work with files/folders, but couldn’t describe them precisely when put on the spot.
For example, I’d consider “Well, folders are containers for files and other folders. And a file is, well I don’t know, but an example is a Word document, or a jpeg.” to be a good enough description. That person is ready to roll.
And I think we agree that systems designers have a bias of being able to describe and reason about their abstractions precisely, and sometimes make the fatal flaw of assuming that the end user will have this too.