I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer.
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@jtb @jalefkowit Indeed. I met someone who never used anything but their phone, and they were completely lost on a trackpad-based laptop with no touchscreen. They kept poking the screen, then poking the trackpad assuming absolute positioning. They had no idea what the pointer was, or how to “drag” anything.
It dawned on me that we no longer have any onboarding training or truly basic affordances for people who had never used a trackpad or mouse with a pointer before, which with the explosion of touchscreen mobile devices these days, must be a HUGE number of people.
@drahardja @jalefkowit Someone who had never had a computer, but had used one, asked me if when he bought one it would come with a manual. I naively thought he meant how to set it up, which is all manuals tell you these days, but he wanted a manual on how to use it. We take it for granted these day that you ask the internet how to do things. But there was a time when there were many books in the library on how to use computers.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit so true. I never was too aware of this until I started coaching people with basic online skills. Computers (esp windows!) and the internet have become so very hostile to new users. In the past things were difficult in other ways, but then we did not have the cookie walls, advertisements, confusing popups and notifications, the different OS ecosystems, AI, etc etc.
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@mancavgeek @jalefkowit https://aus.social/@stib/116117883536605111 ... Anecdotal data on your assumption being correct
@mainec Crikey!
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@NatalyaD @jalefkowit @DJDarren UIs randomly changing is a huge thing!
@jtonline @NatalyaD @jalefkowit @DJDarren it's driven by marketing Apple's pointless Liquid Ass being a case in point.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit Yes, much this!
"Yes, you can tap there, it'll pop something up". "No, not there, even though it looks pretty much the same".
"Yes, that is an input field", and only AFTER tapping it, it indeed looks like an input field.
This is so stoopid,
agree on your sentiment. -
@jalefkowit At the risk of Beetlejuicing xkcd, people who have been “doing computers” for a long time vastly overestimate how familiar people are with computers, even when they attempt to “dumb it down” for the masses. AFFORDANCES ARE STILL IMPORTANT.
People do NOT know what that icon means. They do NOT know that thing is interactable. They do NOT know they can edge-swipe. They do NOT know they can long-press.
Worse, YOUNG people who are “doing computers” underestimate the degradation of eyesight, swiftness, and motor control that is built into the aging process. Any operation that requires fine motor control, eagle eyes, and rock-steady hands with nimble fingers is hostile.
@drahardja
Young people dont even understand the concept of a file system, what files are and how they can be organized in folders and sub-folders, or copied to physical mediaAnd i DONT blame them for that
They have grown up with "Smartphones" where everything is like scrolling through a gallery, and everything magically syncs up across devices because of some magic google does
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@CdnCurmudgeon @jalefkowit I also suffer from the affliction "marinated in tech", is that what we call this old stew flavour?
@jeffhorton @jalefkowit
Depends on when you started. I began with changing tubs in TV sets and radios in the '50s. That's tech paleontology. So fossilized instead of marinated might be more appropriate for my cohort. After that, instant dinner tech or maybe transistor tech...then LED tech, laser tech... -
@jalefkowit so true. I never was too aware of this until I started coaching people with basic online skills. Computers (esp windows!) and the internet have become so very hostile to new users. In the past things were difficult in other ways, but then we did not have the cookie walls, advertisements, confusing popups and notifications, the different OS ecosystems, AI, etc etc.
@lhengstmengel @jalefkowit "I know why this user interface element acts in this broken manner but trying to put it into words, live with the person next to me, is a task my brain is not up to"
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@NatalyaD @jalefkowit @jtonline I'm at a point where I'm wondering whether it might be beneficial to put Mint on my 2011 MacBook, and give it to MiL.
She already uses Firefox, so all I'd need is to make sure that's prominent and available and signed in to her account. We'll be able to remote into it if anything does awry, and I can run software updates in the background.
It has no battery, but she never moves her current laptop anyway. And it'll be a damn sight more stable than the budget Windows laptop she currently has.
I have my mum on iOS on her 2016 Macbook which was new when she bought it and we've kept going since. I run updates and time machine each visit. She manages Chrome or FireFox as browsers and Libre Office for documents (and she is uneducatedly dyslexically horrific with a spreadsheet regardless of application).
In a way as long as it is stable, consistent, you have the useful apps in 'the place for apps' I think it can work well. Windows is however hell.
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@jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is a question of great and genuine interest to me.
My Apple ][+ was definitely a hard brick wall to somebody who’d never used one. Also, any specific piece of software behaved in extremely limited, extremely consistent ways, so that once somebody had learned to use it, they could continue using it.
My first-gen iPhone was a miraculous device. I could hand it to somebody who’d never used a touch screen or a “smart“ phone of any kind, and they would — without exception! I tried this experiment multiple times! — be able to figure out how to use it just by experimentation and intuition. I really don’t think that’s true of iPhones now. But a current iPhone offers far more capabilities.
Were computers easier or harder in the past? Or just •differently• hard? How? Whose needs have we prioritized? Whose comfort?
@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi
My very first computer was a (then somewhat outdated) Macintosh Performa. OS 7.6.11 iirc.
I loved it. It came with little tutorials like „mousing around“ for people who had never worked with a mouse, and it always seemed to provide several ways to achieve the thing you wanted. It all felt very intuitive to me.
Everyone around me was cursing their windows machines and I always said, get a Mac. The ones who did were happy, too.
So in my experience, these computers weren’t difficult to use.
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