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.
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.