- One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages. This was difficult because the problem statement was implicit and involved multiple steps and multiple constraints. It would have been much easier to solve the explicitly stated problem of booking room A for Wednesday at 3pm, but having to determine the ultimate need based on piecing together many pieces of info from across separate applications made this a difficult job for many users.
Here is the scary stat:
- The numbers for the 4 skill levels don’t sum to 100% because a large proportion of the respondents never attempted the tasks, being unable to use computers. In total, across the OECD countries, 26% of adults were unable to use a computer.
The number of people I meet that cannot write a simple email with a direct request for assistance is astounding.
This does not surprise me much, unfortunately. What does surprise me in my day-to-day life is the incompetence of youth who have grown up with nearly unfettered access to high speed internet and a variety of devices. I teach suburban high schoolers from upper-middle class families, and my students are astoundingly tech illiterate. They do not understand, conceptually, the difference between cloud storage and local storage. They are unable to download a file and then locate it later because they have absolutely no grasp of files or folders or where/how to access/sort information on the machine. Hell, they don't even know how to navigate menus to change display settings, sort information differently, or save a Google Doc as PDF. These kids are freshmen and juniors in high school-- they are 14-16 years old, and if I let them, they would spend the entire school day staring at their phones, laptops, and iPads.
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I had assumed, previously, that being raised on tech would result in a high baseline literacy with the software, but I was wrong. They use their devices all day, but it seems like they use them for such specific, shallow, narrow tasks that they don't pick up any skills beyond how to navigate Instagram and pick up the latest online Jugendsprache. I spend a depressing amount of instructional time either walking them through basic steps to upload an assignment or doing it for them.
I have been thinking lately that the push towards "usability" within applications has only increased abstraction and made it more difficult to know what is actually going on in the computer.
I was trying to help my mother transfer some photos from the computer to a flash drive the other day and walking her through the steps over the phone was impossible so I had her share her computer screen with me. I had never used the Windows 10 Photos application before and the way it organizes and collects all of the images on the computer makes it very confusing to just grab a file a move it. The steps to actually find the location of the file on the drive and navigate to it was too high. Then she ended up transferring some of them multiple times and it became a huge mess.
It reminds me of iTunes and how I can't stand the way all of the music on my old iPod existed as on big library blob and it wouldn't let me manipulate the individual files. Why not? How it it easier to abandon a paradigm that is shared across all operating systems and applications on the computer and forces me to do it through your slow, buggy program? Give me a file hierarchy and show me what is on the device.
- I have been thinking lately that the push towards "usability" within applications has only increased abstraction and made it more difficult to know what is actually going on in the computer.
Good god yes. I can edit my registry but I find most social media software to be burdened with so many options and lingo that I loose interest before I gain proficiency in their use.
It's thing like moving files on my phone. Some phones make it really hard to just plug it into a computer and open files and move them. They try to force a intermediary to manage all your data that only makes things slower with more buttons and options that I have to parse and figure out before my data gets moved.
If I'm not afraid to muck about deep in my computers guts It should be child's play to move a few goddamn files but often I find it something other than straight forward.
Apple has been making it harder and harder for me to find the root of my filesystem on their OS for years. No wonder people don't know how to do this.
And god forbid I want to manage the files on my god damn iPhone.
If you'd asked me to grade myself on this scale, I'd have put myself in the medium skills level. I can do most of the things I want to do, but I know I have limitations. But seeing "schedule a meeting" as difficult really shows how many people struggle more than I do. Scheduling a meeting here sucks because there's always at least one conflict, and if everybody is free all the rooms are full. But I can do it.
Depending on my group of recipients, I'll write emails differently. Even then, when being explicit and restating my request in different ways, some people will respond incorrectly. Results like the article here are a good reminder.
- I can do most of the things I want to do, but I know I have limitations.
That sentence, showing a brutal self-awareness, makes you smarter than 90% of the people out there.
- Depending on my group of recipients, I'll write emails differently.
I sent an email in response to a school asking for an astronomy program and telescope event. I was complimented on my email and the contact wanted to know where I taught English(!). Seriously, people, I type like a baboon and can barely speak 3-4 sentences in a row without um's uh's and er's.