I have a theory. When I was interning with a volunteer group, there was this lovely older lady I was working with; like many groups we used computers for a lot of our tasks and (I think) Windows 7 had just come out. This lady was very much not the type to make her problems everyone else’s but I remember her excitedly telling about how she was learning the new process of things on 7, in contrast to Vista. She showed me the step-by-step notes she’d taken to open particular app.s, detailing opening the start menu and where to clickbto find them. Having recently discovered Linux (and desperate to share the good news), I thought she might find my setup somewhat similar and wanted to get her opinion. I figured it’d be pretty similar (open menu; I figured simply searching for the app.'s name would be easier for her than the many steps she was taking) but, right as I typed the first character of the app.'s name, she exclaimed, “Nope! This is too much!” She said it jovially, clearly as in, “Thanks for trying but I’m overwhelmed, already,” but I was struck by how much she was clearly going about this as concrete, manual steps rather than putting together a sense of a general UI.
And, for whatever reason, reading through this thread made me think of appliances.
They’re always different. Even similar devices, like a microwave, can have a differing UI that can provide unexpected results with little explanation because, well, lack of available physical space (as an example, quick microwaving; that threw me for a loop the first time I used one and pressing 2 immediately kicked off microwaving for 2 minutes). If I was using someone else’s microwave, no one would begrudge me asking how it works.
Of course, many of these devices come with manuals. I’m not certain how my husband’s coffee maker works but I could figure it out, if need be. I’m definitely not saying that the reactions of some older people aren’t beyond the pale.
But I think, for some, they’re thinking of it like another person’s microwave (this more applies to those who generally don’t use smart phones, etc. themselves); except a phone or computer is much more complicated so they never quite fully learn it. And, despite their attempts to avoid it, they’re becoming exceedingly more integral to our ways of operating because of how easy they make doing things. No one would bat an eye at someone who reheats everything on the stove because they don’t like microwaves (or no one gives me a side eye because I prefer to cook rice in a pot on the stove, like my mother taught me to do it, rather than use a rice cooker).
But we’re all extremely cognizant when Ethel doesn’t want to E-mail the forms because she likes writing by hand.
I dunno; I definitely think there’s a lot of malicious learned ignorance that a lot of people here have clearly encountered but I suspect that the reason “this is the way it’s been for 3 decades, now” isn’t effective is they’re still thinking it’s yet another someone’s microwave; and every appliance has a different UI (they think even though that’s very much less true with smart phones and computers); they don’t want to learn it for the (supposedly) only 5 minutes they need to use it. And the frustration that it’s not more intuitive builds (unlike with a particular microwave) because (for some bizarre reason~) they keep running into scenarios where they’re expected to use it.
they’re thinking of it like another person’s microwave
This. My parents, quite smart people in general, have become somewhat proficient with computers over the years, to do the specific tasks they use them for, but they seem to have done so by memorising the steps, and are stumped when something doesn’t work as expected or the interface changes.
They seem to lack the ability to read the screen, not for lack of trying or because they don’t know they should do that, but because they seem to get overwhelmed.
They might know what menus and dialogs are, to some extent (not context menus, though, those are beyond them), and how to use them to do the specific tasks they’ve learned to do, but I don’t think they have a generalized concept of a menu or a dialog, they treat each one as a completely independent set of steps, part of the excessively complex set of the steps that is the whole interface.
I think their brains might have been wired to learn specific steps for specific specialised tools, since that’s how it was for most of their youth, and when they had to deal with a general purpose machine they reused that tooling to learn each thing it could do as a separate process, without ever developing the mental tools to deal with the interface as a whole, and now they’re trapped in that model of thinking and learning each new process is an overwhelming chore.
I have a theory. When I was interning with a volunteer group, there was this lovely older lady I was working with; like many groups we used computers for a lot of our tasks and (I think) Windows 7 had just come out. This lady was very much not the type to make her problems everyone else’s but I remember her excitedly telling about how she was learning the new process of things on 7, in contrast to Vista. She showed me the step-by-step notes she’d taken to open particular app.s, detailing opening the start menu and where to clickbto find them. Having recently discovered Linux (and desperate to share the good news), I thought she might find my setup somewhat similar and wanted to get her opinion. I figured it’d be pretty similar (open menu; I figured simply searching for the app.'s name would be easier for her than the many steps she was taking) but, right as I typed the first character of the app.'s name, she exclaimed, “Nope! This is too much!” She said it jovially, clearly as in, “Thanks for trying but I’m overwhelmed, already,” but I was struck by how much she was clearly going about this as concrete, manual steps rather than putting together a sense of a general UI.
And, for whatever reason, reading through this thread made me think of appliances.
They’re always different. Even similar devices, like a microwave, can have a differing UI that can provide unexpected results with little explanation because, well, lack of available physical space (as an example, quick microwaving; that threw me for a loop the first time I used one and pressing 2 immediately kicked off microwaving for 2 minutes). If I was using someone else’s microwave, no one would begrudge me asking how it works.
Of course, many of these devices come with manuals. I’m not certain how my husband’s coffee maker works but I could figure it out, if need be. I’m definitely not saying that the reactions of some older people aren’t beyond the pale.
But I think, for some, they’re thinking of it like another person’s microwave (this more applies to those who generally don’t use smart phones, etc. themselves); except a phone or computer is much more complicated so they never quite fully learn it. And, despite their attempts to avoid it, they’re becoming exceedingly more integral to our ways of operating because of how easy they make doing things. No one would bat an eye at someone who reheats everything on the stove because they don’t like microwaves (or no one gives me a side eye because I prefer to cook rice in a pot on the stove, like my mother taught me to do it, rather than use a rice cooker).
But we’re all extremely cognizant when Ethel doesn’t want to E-mail the forms because she likes writing by hand.
I dunno; I definitely think there’s a lot of malicious learned ignorance that a lot of people here have clearly encountered but I suspect that the reason “this is the way it’s been for 3 decades, now” isn’t effective is they’re still thinking it’s yet another someone’s microwave; and every appliance has a different UI (they think even though that’s very much less true with smart phones and computers); they don’t want to learn it for the (supposedly) only 5 minutes they need to use it. And the frustration that it’s not more intuitive builds (unlike with a particular microwave) because (for some bizarre reason~) they keep running into scenarios where they’re expected to use it.
This. My parents, quite smart people in general, have become somewhat proficient with computers over the years, to do the specific tasks they use them for, but they seem to have done so by memorising the steps, and are stumped when something doesn’t work as expected or the interface changes.
They seem to lack the ability to read the screen, not for lack of trying or because they don’t know they should do that, but because they seem to get overwhelmed.
They might know what menus and dialogs are, to some extent (not context menus, though, those are beyond them), and how to use them to do the specific tasks they’ve learned to do, but I don’t think they have a generalized concept of a menu or a dialog, they treat each one as a completely independent set of steps, part of the excessively complex set of the steps that is the whole interface.
I think their brains might have been wired to learn specific steps for specific specialised tools, since that’s how it was for most of their youth, and when they had to deal with a general purpose machine they reused that tooling to learn each thing it could do as a separate process, without ever developing the mental tools to deal with the interface as a whole, and now they’re trapped in that model of thinking and learning each new process is an overwhelming chore.