The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
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This is where you will find your true 10x'ers. The developer who is so intelligent and experienced that they can accurately emulate an entire "level 1" user in their own brain for purposes of testing a UX/UI concept. Putting both a really clever design and a really stupid user into your head at the same time is very challenging. But, if you can figure out how to pull this off, you can rapidly arrive at designs that are intuitive for all without a bunch of painful iterations.
I've definitely seen the 10x that can't do this. Their UI design concepts usually turn out to look like something from a 4x game (and not a 'casual' one like CIV5). A user interface that exactly 1 person could enjoy using. About as clever as it gets and equally as worthless.
Try constraining the hell out of yourself next time you build something that a typical person would use (i.e. any B2C product). Ask things like "If I didn't know how to read, could I still find my way around this interface?". Clearly, this is too low a bar to effectively use some applications, but simply trying to aim in that direction over and over can help evaporate the more "clever" concepts in favor of your less skilled users.
I certainly think developers should be involved in UI design, but I don't think they should be the main decision makers in most cases, precisely because "putting both a really clever design and a really stupid user into your head at the same time is very challenging," and I wouldn't expect it to necessarily correlate with programming skill.
Not saying you can't employ a UI designer who does this full-time, but the final software product and the entire experience around it is still the developer's full responsibility. With this in mind, perhaps we'd like the developers to be more involved with UI design meetings?
All of this gets me back to the front-end/back-end meme that seems to have emerged over the last decade. Same sort of problem. All you do with this "not my problem" game is make your own life harder the next iteration.
So to be clear - I am not saying you have to do the whole product yourself, but I am saying that you need to care enough about it or it's going to turn out like shit. Writing software that people use is still decidedly an art form. Imagine paying to go to an art gallery filled with pieces created by artists who absolutely hate to make art.
The developer is not.
What is programming skill? For loops and writing a recusion function?
If you ever talk to a lawyer, they're not just robots that regurgitate the law, they can can give you good advice on mediation, and alternative means of resolving conflict. They'll aks you things like "are you sure you want to go through this, this is what this entails, etc." They don't just go "I only the know the law, I don't have a background in pschology, anthropology, sociology".
If you're a salesperson, you should know something about the product you're selling and have some communication skills. They don't just go "I am only here to show you to the car we're selling, I don't have a communications degree, I don't know how to offer you a deal".
Sometimes it feels like only in software are people so coddled that they think this stuff is normal. People will hire with leetcode as a strong signal and have stack ranking, and then somehow think that the streotypes of devs only being goot at logic puzzles and lacking human understanding are true.
This is very useful for people who are developing UX/UIs for the older population.
A quickly growing segment where a lot of the users want to do things like use tech to keep in touch with their families and grandkids from a nursing home and they may not be as sharp as the average user of tech products...
However during this journey, you may discover a better method. The other group also came to realise this, but since they invested so much into the origal design, they continue down that path. True refactoring only happens when disgruntled former employees decide to quit and reengineer the solution, this time they create a better product.
If you have two folders open in Microsoft Windows, and drag an item from one to the other... there are 3 possible actions (as of a decade ago) that might happen according to an set of rules the user can't be expected to know....
It might copy the file
it might create a shortcut to the file
it might move the file
This is just a tiny example of the inconsistency of one of the oldest and most stable parts of the UI on a desktop. To coounteract this, I always taught about right-click and drag/drop to actively select which was to happen.
Throw in a phone, or the internet, and the UI de jure force through the web... how dare they cast aspersions on the users.... it's not their fault.
At least the icon changed based on which action was going to happen. Knowing to look for that icon change, on the other hand...
The attitude that an interface has to work for novices as well as experts is one of the reasons that interfaces keep getting worse.
As noted above, discoverability of this function sucks, so “accidentally“ is about the only real way to find it.
This is consistent, it's just never properly communicated. If the source and destination are on the same drive, dragging executes a move by default; if the source and destination are on different drives, dragging makes a copy by default.
macOS has this problem too, where you just flat out can't cut/copy/move files with the same shortcuts and verbiage you'd use for text (or the option in the menu is greyed out for no reason).
In stark contrast are gen z and gen alpha (?) where many i’ve interacted with do not understand folder structures, startup sequences or even how to type with more than two fingers. They are excellent at typing on a screen with their thumbs but writing an excel macro? It is completely alien. navigating folders? A struggle.
As tech matures, skills are dropping and alarmingly so.
Here is the original report: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264258051-en.pdf...
It's so strange, I feel like I'm in this weird middle ground of understand desktop and mobile OS's just fine, but the older generation and the younger generation are siloed into one or the other.
I did have to make an intentional effort to become comfortable on a mobile device, though.
Smaller fingers and better eyes are what’s required, I guess. So, not me.
A reckoning is coming. You can't intentionally make an entire generation stupid and not feel the consequences eventually. Who's going to teach their kids?
There are more things to learn today at school. They teach feelings for a start, that didnt happen in my day which perhaps explains why skills in computing are dropping. Not only that, people are no longer concerned with what part of town are they going to live in, settle down etc etc, now they consider what part of the world they want to live in. The constraints of family & school friends, region and country are being battered by globalisation which is mainly being driven by the internet.
Watching the BBC news, here in the UK and you could be forgiven for thinking the population in the rest of the world are just criminally insane terrorists, but thats what the UK press portray the rest of the world as to the British people.
I think they are using Project Fear to keep people here, in a desperate attempt to maintain GDP amongst other things.
So all in all, beside computing, today I know more about finance and biology than I would have ever learnt if I didnt have a job that gave me easy access to the internet, and the GP's hate me for it, when I have to deal with them, rattling off info is like a game of top trumps, until they lose and storm off! But they only know what they have been spoon fed, look at Wimbledon champion Andrew Murray, if his nutritionists and the NHS were any good, he wouldn't be the only player with an artificial hip playing tennis at Wimbledon, and yet for some mad reason, people think thats a good thing and something to be proud of!
I'm sure the women who were portrayed in the Hollywood film Hidden Figures have probably lamented how the skills to land a man on the moon have been lost to mainframes, its a human trait to point out problems and then discuss them, but when will we be discussing these things with AI's and get credible advice back from the code?
Is it happening right now?
We (Late X, millenials) did have to struggle just to operate a computer. We had to build a mental model to work around inadequate tools in the OS and beyond.
Younger people have had adequate tools to interact with computers, so they've never been forced to build that mental model - to build an intuitive understanding of how a computer works. So, yeah, it's not too surprising to me.
They can absolutely learn such models, but it's going to take more effort and intentional digging for rough spots to do so. For the most part, it's not like we can just give them a '95 PC with Windows 95 and say "go for it."
on the topic of tools, i want to add something i rue - the loss of printed instruction manuals. My iphone can do a lot and has many features but most are useless to me because one - there is no printed manual i can use (a screen is a sub-par replacement) and..
two - the discoverability is terrible. With more things moving mobile-first, the discoverability of features is just gone. there’s a delicate balance between the capability of software and the east of use. TeX comes to mind a a good example.
Even digital `man` pages would be nice sometimes. Not the watered down "Help" pages.
> With more things moving mobile-first, the discoverability of features is just gone.
I'm on the fence about this one. Curiosity will drive a lot of discoverability, but the "locations" of features changes so quickly that all your prior discovery is rendered moot.
"I know this feature exists but can't find it," is little different from "This feature doesn't exist."
But yea it’s terrible. Whether intentional or not, ignoring “power users” cuz they’ll figure it out regardless vs coddling the rest and not overwhelming them sucks ass
And not even having the willingness to learn the basics of these tools you use for hours daily breaks my brain. The profit optimization which tries to drive the barriers to entry for usability to the ground are a big problem too. Removes incentive/requirement to learn about it for those that needed it.
And personally I cant stand using my iphone while my gen seems perfectly content with navigating pop ups and unblockable mobile youtube ads and profiling and no customizable workflow etc. I find it sad as fuck that tech is trending toward the masses blindly accepting what’s served to them but I guess that’s the way most things have gone.
2: One can argue that all of what you define as 'tech skills' are actually just legacy thought processes that have gone by the wayside. Folder structures are often silly on modern devices with great search. Startup sequences are unneeded to be known because their modern hardware solves it's own problems when things go wrong (ChromeOS for example can just re-image and restore files/settings automatically upon boot failure). They know how to type with their thumbs because the full size keyboard is not relevant and once again, schools don't teach it. Microsoft will gladly have GPT 4.0 write a macro faster than you could.
3: I would also bet that later generations are better at some things. Notably handling the social web, personal image, and expecting to deal with scams and fraud. Our generation got thrown head first into a world where everything is there always. Where your past follows you. They grew up with it, it is native. They know to be more careful in sharing. Their bullies sit down at their dinner tables and on their nightstand because the internet and social networks exist after school hours. General smartphone use skills are likely better. Gen Z is also, according to other reports, less likely to smoke or drink and generally more willing to make stable life choices.
It's easily to point the finger at a next generation but I think A: The problem tends to be the prior generation's fault. It is wild that so many generations will say 'kids these days' but it is their kids. B: The lens through which the generation is judged is not actually fair. I would also note this: The generation before us would argue that we don't know how to drive stick, read an analog clock, or balance a checkbook. The world moved on.
Yes, because nothing ever goes wrong or needs to be changed to fit your own process Silly user, just do it my way.
This type of thinking os anathema to developing computer skills. Computer skills are the knowledge to decompose work processes into logical sets of instructions such that you can utilize artfully arranged sand to do the work for you. That still requires knowing how that sand works at some level, and the thought that went into the tools for you to use.
I will never use an Android/IOS phone to the level I will my linux systems. Why? Because the people who architected Android specifically did so with their own and not my interests in mind.
When you need to read an asinine amount of literature to realize mofos did everything possible to keep you away from the hardware, to keep them from having to have a "support division" because they weren't interested in empowering you beyond in the capacity as a consumer of their service, it gets to point I reject anything going on under that paradigm as legitimate computing tbqh.
Or, I can just leave it alone and not tinker with it so that I can still play my match three game and send funny pictures to my sister.
When I was taking 3dsMax in college, my professor said something very similar. If you want to try something, save a copy and try it. Nothing lost. I've learned quite a bit in both 3d modeling and programming by not being afraid to break things.
Unfortunately that's not really an option for most business software, and it's also not always very apparent what various functions in business software actually does (in terms of secondary implications). My first programming job was developing tools to ingest reports from various front of the house systems into back office accounting systems. I would have users sit down with me and go through what reports they used, what data they wanted, and pull the sources for that data from the system.
It's amazing how many users would not know how to do much of anything beyond clicking exactly where they expected to in order to do the half a dozen or so day to day functions they needed to perform, to the point of not knowing where individual reports where because they were all run at the end of the day as a report package rather than on demand. Even clicking on menu items to see what the options were would get people on edge. Running reports should be something that's an idempotent operation, but there would still be reluctance. That being said, there also were reports that would have implications when run as they would either close things for the day, or various counters would be reset.
That's a long way of saying "just break things" isn't really good advice for users. Fixing things takes time and skill, neither of which the user might have. "Breaking things" might have far more significant implications that just going back to your last saved file. It also implies that the user knows when things are "broken". The longer it goes that they don't realize things are "broken", the more likely there will be problems and the more work was likely lost. That's also assuming they realize things are "broken", which is a point some users may never get to.
I'm glad that today most kids will never have to deal with the fear of sitting at a red light on a steep incline just knowing you're gonna spin the tires, stall the car, or roll back into the car behind you (while your girlfriend eyes you from the passenger seat.) A not just once, but dozens of times over the better part of a year, just to get to school or a friends house or my summer job while I got used to that transmission.
Today, my car's engine compartment is hermetically sealed and it practically drives itself. Would a kid today be able to answer my questions about or demonstrate how to drive a stick, or pull a tranny, open it up and swap in some junkyard gears? Probably not, but I don't think there's anything wrong with her not having any of those skills. IN fact, I think it's wonderful she should never need them.
Computers, the things I grew up with -- boxes you could build or easily modify to make neat things happen, are lost, just like my then new to me but 10 years used 1980 honda accord 5 speed. Sure, a few enthusiasts may still buy hot hatches with a stick today, but even those vehicles will be gone in a just a couple more years.
The computer, with it's user serviceable hardware and software is dead; long live the iPad.
Every 1 star review I have seen is because the customer has been unable to make the card show up on their computer.
I have to consciously remind myself that it's almost always because they don't know how to format a storage device, not because the cards are faulty out of the box.
Most people are on phones now, who uses computers if not for work?
But I guess one could argue using phones would be the same, but even then my personal experience is that most people don't know much about phones either.
Delete: maybe tap and hold, then three dots or an (i), maybe swipe right/left/either.
Close an image: probably pull down from the top but not always.
Undo: Shake the phone like an etch-a-sketch???
Whereas Outlook Express, for example, looking at screenshots, had a big red X with Delete written underneath it in the toolbar. And your mouse had a physical button dedicated to stuff that's now hidden away behind long-press or swipe or the (i) or whatever.
I expect that this includes people with disabilities (physical, learning) that prevent computer use, and that it’s a large number of people?
PS: shout-out and thanks to ben_w who mentioned this article in the discussion about the Algerian internet shutdowns.
However, most of HN is curl-bashing unverified scripts into their computers and servers...