The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
December 4, 2016 11:25 AM   Subscribe

 
Another example of level-3 task is “You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.”
I think I may be a level-2 person, because I could figure out what percentage of emails sent by John Smith contained the word "sustainability" in the subject or the body, but I don't have the first clue how I could determine which percentage of the emails were *about* sustainability. I'd have to read each email and make some determination of what it was about, based on a definition of the term sustainability. (I assume that some emails would be about sustainability without explicitly using the term.) Am I missing something?

But yes, I totally agree that most computer-thing-designing people totally overestimate the extent of the average user's tech skills.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:35 AM on December 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


The main point I want to make is that you, dear reader, are almost certainly in the top category of computer skills

So wrong, and if I had a BBC micro to hand I would show the outer limit of my skills by getting it to write FUCK OFF all the way down the screen, just as I was taught at school.
posted by biffa at 11:38 AM on December 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


Several of the higher-level examples do seem to involve non-computer skill sets (e.g., setting up a conference room using information from multiple emails is, well, annoying at best -- do I get docked if I fail to realize that Barbara said that she can't make the 3pm conference everyone else seemed to have agreed on?). But I don't think I'm a level-3 person, unless I'm allowed to do things like write down the number of emails by John Smith and the number of emails by John Smith using the term "sustainability" and then calculate the number offline.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:44 AM on December 4, 2016


Given how email-centric the sample tasks are, maybe everyone could move up a group if Outlook weren't (a) obligatory and (b) a piece of shit whose bad design is never addressed because everyone is used to it because of (a).
posted by howfar at 11:46 AM on December 4, 2016 [72 favorites]


It seems like they're talking about "skills" that aren't necessarily strictly computer-related. I mean, it's like they've written an article about things they themselves might need to do, and then decided that if other people don't know how to do them, they're less computer proficient globally, rather than specifically.

What I mean is, nobody I know in my job or jobs like mine would ever need to find out what percentage of emails sent by one person in the last year was about one subject. Computer literacy often ties into the skills needed to complete the tasks necessary to the job at hand.
posted by tzikeh at 11:48 AM on December 4, 2016 [35 favorites]


I wonder what the OECD defines as a "computer." Japan seems to be at the top of the list in terms of the number of people with superior computer skills, but for the past decade or so the primary way most people access the internet is with a smart phone, not a PC, laptop or Mac thingy.
posted by My Dad at 11:59 AM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


The "literacy" I find most offensive are UI axmen tooling with my real estate by way of "notifications" functioning as dialogue windows with options purposefully aligned to harvest a misclick.

Hey There! We've yet to commandeer the executives to make an egregious permission the default and require you to: Do this now..Do this ten minutes from now...Do this tomorrow...Automate It!
posted by lazycomputerkids at 11:59 AM on December 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


My entire 30-odd year career has been in IT and user support. I am no longer surprised at the lack of fundamental computer skills in the majority of the population, though the examples given in the article aren't the best (as others have pointed out).

I'm talking about basic stuff like knowing how to find files and navigate their computer's system (as in, "What do you mean click on the Start button? What's a "task bar"?), paying attention to error messages instead of just breezing past them then wondering why something isn't working, remembering their damn password (I mean, not even paying attention when they set it, as if it couldn't possibly be useful knowledge later on), misuse of and uselessly responding to Reply All blasts....

Nope, I'm no longer surprised, but I'm still often shocked.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:04 PM on December 4, 2016 [46 favorites]


UM. "User Skills"? i can grep.
"Level-3 person" Makes me worry for you. Not that a lot of us haven't felt that we were alienated
I'm scared to speak in this thread - I was a charter member of the (I shit you not) Positive Action Subcommittee. I might have been President.
posted by vapidave at 12:07 PM on December 4, 2016


I think I may be a level-2 person, because I could figure out what percentage of emails sent by John Smith contained the word "sustainability" in the subject or the body, but I don't have the first clue how I could determine which percentage of the emails were *about* sustainability. I'd have to read each email and make some determination of what it was about, based on a definition of the term sustainability. (I assume that some emails would be about sustainability without explicitly using the term.) Am I missing something?

Yeah holy cow. This is still an unsolved problem in NLP, so IDK. I don't think level 3 consists entirely of computer science professors who have time travelled from the year 2035. Maybe the idea is that part of the task just involves reading through all of them, and figuring out how to get the computer to help you do that efficiently? Maybe that's what "high monitoring demands" means.
posted by vogon_poet at 12:09 PM on December 4, 2016 [18 favorites]


1. Oddly or not, I know any number of older Americans who manage to get by and are happy with no computer skills or need for electronics.
2. In any number of "rich countries," there are many who are not rich and have little or no access to computers or to those who would teach them skills, and so they do without.
3. Age is a barrier, for sure. I am over 80 and find the net, computers, and a nifty phone useful; many though are fearful of something that for them came rather late in their lives, and which intimidates them
posted by Postroad at 12:10 PM on December 4, 2016 [23 favorites]


My dad asked me to help him with a computer problem when I was home for Thanksgiving. He couldn't upload files to his email. It turns out that when he clicked on the paperclip in his email, it took him to a different folder from his documents folder, and he didn't realize he needed to navigate to his documents folder, which is where his documents are. He's not a dumb person, and he's not particularly technically inept for his peer group. So yeah: I think the issue is real and is something that developers and designers need to keep in mind. But the article is still sort of weird.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:12 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


"It seems like they're talking about "skills" that aren't necessarily strictly computer-related. I mean, it's like they've written an article about things they themselves might need to do, and then decided that if other people don't know how to do them, they're less computer proficient globally, rather than specifically."

Reminds me of the apocryphal phrase, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

But yes, they've just taken "basic skills" measures, and attempted to create variations of them that utilize computers in particular. Since most of those measures were created out of the idea of testing whether someone would work well in an office environment, it makes sense that communication and collaboration tools like email would be prominent. That doesn't make it a very good measure, though.
posted by mystyk at 12:17 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Age is a barrier, for sure. I am over 80 and find the net, computers, and a nifty phone useful; many though are fearful of something that for them came rather late in their lives, and which intimidates them.
52 here and I'm tired of learning phones.
posted by vapidave at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


Geeks have been complaining about how computer illiterate the "olds" are for over 30 years...long enough time for a lot of the geeks to become the "olds" themselves. And, yet, olds are still considered uniformly illiterate.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


I think the issue is real and is something that developers and designers need to keep in mind. But the article is still sort of weird.

It absolutely is and the article is no basis for it. Citing PARC's use of kids would be. UI design evolved from utility to commercial function.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:21 PM on December 4, 2016


I'm talking about basic stuff like knowing how to find files and navigate their computer's system (as in, "What do you mean click on the Start button? What's a "task bar"?), paying attention to error messages instead of just breezing past them then wondering why something isn't working, remembering their damn password (I mean, not even paying attention when they set it, as if it couldn't possibly be useful knowledge later on), misuse of and uselessly responding to Reply All blasts....

Nope, I'm no longer surprised, but I'm still often shocked.


Isn't that more of a problem with Windows (and to some extent Mac OS) itself?
posted by My Dad at 12:22 PM on December 4, 2016


This sounds like it was written to make you think people suck, but as someone who has been writing software since elementary school it just makes me think software sucks.
posted by trackofalljades at 12:23 PM on December 4, 2016 [21 favorites]


Just having one in your face all your life surprisingly isn't a very good training tool for those not already inclined to break them apart to see how they tick.

If being inclined to break them apart is necessary to be a literate computer user, I'm afraid the tech world have really missed their consumer base. They've created a tool/toy for themselves and not the average person (a group which outnumbers tech types by a wide, wide, wide margin.)
posted by Thorzdad at 12:33 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


I currently work in internal communications for an IT department, and I'm constantly having to tell colleagues (and myself) to ratchet expectations down. Even some of my colleagues in the it department don't know basic shortcuts like copy and paste, I had one call me cause she wanted to insert a picture in a ppt. Literally that's all she wanted to do.

Its interesting that the article uses email. I think that part of this problem is the way that email is used (in a corporate environment) for a wide variety of tasks, actions, and communications that it really isn't suited for.

The other thing I think is mentality. If I have a computer problem, I Google it. Someone has always had the problem before me. Most of my colleagues, the idea of this self serve mentality is bizarre to them. I suppose they don't feel empowered by computers but instead roughly constrained.

Anyway tl;dr it's hard to go wrong assuming your end users have only used a computer 1-5 times for any comms you do, regardless what people tell you.
posted by smoke at 12:38 PM on December 4, 2016 [12 favorites]


As Sturgeon's Law indicates, software sucks/people suck is not an either/or proposition.
posted by fings at 12:44 PM on December 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


"I'm talking about basic stuff like knowing how to find files and navigate their computer's system..."

It's easy for a computer literate person to see this as basic, but remember, we're not all that far removed from when Windows used Solitaire and Minesweeper (among others) to teach people how to utilize a mouse. Skills are basic to those who do those things every day. It's called "the curse of knowledge" -- it's difficult for someone who learned something to accurately assess the difficulty they originally had in learning that item, or how difficult it may be for someone else. It leads to hubris and frustration, and is the unstated foundation of pretty much every joke made about "dumb users" by tech support people since the job of tech support became a thing.

"...paying attention to error messages instead of just breezing past them then wondering why something isn't working..."

I actually believe a distinct amount of this goes with the UI design. Design right now absolutely does a shit job of helping users gain any clue how bad a particular error might be, what that error is actually about, places to look (or actions to take) to remedy the error, or even so little as allowing a process for a user to recover an error message they missed or glossed over before and then advertising that process to the user. I hate that purveyors of bad design can get a pass on that bad design by just re-labeling the problem as a user issue, and that the majority of the tech community tacitly accepts that.

"...remembering their damn password (I mean, not even paying attention when they set it, as if it couldn't possibly be useful knowledge later on)..."

That's... Wow. Obviously we have too many passwords in today's life, and that's causing a memory problem in general (as well as a weak password problem). We have ways of remedying that, such as password managers, but that requires consistency and forethought (as well as often a chunk of money). But what you describe is something different altogether. I wonder, though, if it isn't a symptom of a similar root issue -- that perhaps people now are floating around so many passwords that their brain is simply turned off when the process of having to create a new one arises.

"...misuse of and uselessly responding to Reply All blasts..."

This isn't a tech-savvy deficit problem, but a societal problem that pokes into our tech-linked life. In general, you're presented with two options: Reply, and Reply-All. If you want something else, then it is on the user to do that something else. Adding another person is straightforward, but removing is just seen as wasting someone's time. I don't see a way around that issue. I suppose you could add a "Reply-Some" button that forces you to check the TO and CC lines, but I doubt again that people would follow it. You could add an option for appropriate personnel (including recipients who didn't want a message) to "silence" the conversation, sort of like the "[X] has removed themselves from the conversation" messages seen in some group chats, but that requires not only extensive re-engineering of the flow (and intent) in many email systems, but a change in how we look at emails in the first place to a format more like a running conversation rater than a group of discrete but related messages. Some smart email systems are trying to half-way do that, but there's no industry-wide agreement and that's what would really be necessary. Perhaps a better approach is to shift away from emails for things that don't *need* to be emails, and encourage offices to use approaches like Slack for internal comms.
posted by mystyk at 12:44 PM on December 4, 2016 [11 favorites]


Given how email-centric the sample tasks are, maybe everyone could move up a group if Outlook weren't (a) obligatory and (b) a piece of shit whose bad design is never addressed because everyone is used to it because of (a).

As someone who still remembers Lotus Notes: Outlook, like democracy, is the worst system except for all the others.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:45 PM on December 4, 2016 [11 favorites]


As someone who still remembers Lotus Notes: Outlook, like democracy, is the worst system except for all the others.

It's now IBM Notes: Social Edition. Please ask me how I know.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:50 PM on December 4, 2016 [16 favorites]


Outlook, like democracy, is the worst system except for all the others.

But Thunderbird.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:50 PM on December 4, 2016 [10 favorites]


As someone who still remembers Lotus Notes:

Me too, and maybe it's not fair, but the virus vector with Outlook was unforgivable.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:52 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Sadly Lotus Notes is still around, and still sucks as much as outlook and gmail. I tried searching for all emails about 'markers' the other day. Notes helpfully returned all emails to or from or CC'd to anyone named Mark. Gmail and outlook aren't much better.
posted by monotreme at 12:53 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


mystyk - I don't disagree with you, but when a given position (say, a project scheduler or a book editor) is emphatically computer-centric, as they are these days and have been for a while, a conscientious worker needs to know how to use the job's tools - I don't mean becoming an expert, just having basic usage skills and being able to get one's job done with a minimum of fumbling and ignorance. The tools may not be great, but for better or worse they're the tools we have to use at the moment.

Isn't that more of a problem with Windows (and to some extent Mac OS) itself?

I've worked with both Mac and Windows users, and I've seen that a majority of users are equally lacking on both platforms. I'm not an OS evangelist and I've used both Mac and Windows extensively; I don't think either one stands head-and-shoulders above the other for overall usability from a non-IT end-user's point of view. That myth needs to fucking die.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:55 PM on December 4, 2016 [13 favorites]


A human being should be able to defragment a hard drive, change the battery in a wireless mouse, avoid opening a phishing email, know how to use "Paste Special" in Excel, install Ubuntu, fork a Github repository, accept an invitation to the company holiday party, defuse a "reply all" email kerfuffle, write a map-reduce algorithm, change the desktop background, and tell you why manhole covers are round. Specialization is for insects.
posted by thelonius at 1:00 PM on December 4, 2016 [59 favorites]


thelonius: You forgot to add the ability to write an O(n) sorting algorithm purely in assembly for both RISC and CISC processors...
posted by mystyk at 1:04 PM on December 4, 2016 [10 favorites]


"...but when a given position (say, a project scheduler or a book editor) is emphatically computer-centric, as they are these days and have been for a while, a conscientious worker needs to know how to use the job's tools - I don't mean becoming an expert, just having basic usage skills and being able to get one's job done with a minimum of fumbling and ignorance..."

Personally, I agree, they should have those skills if they are not merely relevant but necessary (or nearly so). But the reality is that people are getting into positions based on other skills than their computer ones, and then they hit a wall on computer skills as it applies to that job, and unfortunately griping (however cathartic) doesn't solve it. I don't know what a solution to the problem is, but I know that pointing out that computer users aren't computer savvy is accurate but provably not a solution.

I have a story from when I deployed last. I went to Kuwait (mostly), and while I was there, we had an S1 (personnel officer) whose job was entirely based in Windows and MS Office. She was a senior Major. She had to take remedial courses in Windows and MS Office -- twice! -- while in theater just so she could do her job, and at the end of the day she still couldn't so her enlisted crew did all of it. She still got a good evaluation at the end of the day. At some point, no matter how much computer idiocy in a computer-skills-requiring job is their fault, it's also not because the problem has become bigger than just them.

And as for the curse of knowledge, just remember that it's not an excuse for bad users, just a means of trying to remind ourselves of our own humble origins.
posted by mystyk at 1:14 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


2006: I'm a three!
2016: I'm just about getting the hang of the "fluent user" interface now, so maybe a two?

(I'm pretty certain that, economically-speaking, the "fluent user" interface wiped a middle-sized country off the map in terms of lost productivity.)
posted by Emma May Smith at 1:15 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


"I've worked with both Mac and Windows users, and I've seen that a majority of users are equally lacking on both platforms. I'm not an OS evangelist and I've used both Mac and Windows extensively; I don't think either one stands head-and-shoulders above the other for overall usability from a non-IT end-user's point of view. That myth needs to fucking die."

I know you were responding to someone else, but a resounding yes to this. I do think that one makes more of an *effort* to have their UI at least somewhat more intuitive, but I don't think even that effort goes all that far. And part of that is because UIs started off making things simpler from the old command-line days, but then suddenly switched tracks and have gotten *way* more complex.
posted by mystyk at 1:19 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've had thoughts about this before, and wrote up some thoughts about it twice on my blog. To give the TL;DR version:

People learn how to use computers two ways: task-based, and skill-based. Task-based learners learn how to do a specific task a specific way, while skill-based learners learn patterns that can be applied to multiple tasks. When someone is "good" with computers, odds are they're a skill-based learner. Task-based learners are also stymied by having to do tasks they've never done before, or synthesizing tasks they know how to do in order to accomplish new tasks. Skill-based learners recognize UI patterns and are able to adapt what they know to new tasks and new interfaces.

(Now, for someone who actually knows shit about pedagogy and technology to poke all the holes in my argument.)
posted by SansPoint at 1:21 PM on December 4, 2016 [30 favorites]


Maybe the idea is that part of the task just involves reading through all of them, and figuring out how to get the computer to help you do that efficiently?

My best guess is that the article is poorly worded, and the task itself still involves identifying emails that contain a keyword like "sustainability." It would be more complicated than Level 2, because you have more information to manage, and you have to do a calculation with it.

One thing the article doesn't mention is algorithmic thinking. A lot of people find this challenging, but many "tech" problems like this require it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:25 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yep. Many of my colleagues have heard me tell them exactly how terrible Outlook is, but they don't really get it until I show them something like the incremental drill-down search feature in Thunderbird and then they begin to understand why I hate Outlook.

It's not that people are bad at computers. It's that many of us are using awful tools, and have no clue that better tools are available, because the default set handed out by corporate is user-hostile garbage. The worst part is being knowledgeable enough to KNOW that you're forced to use garbage tools. That's one of Dante's circles of IT hell.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:27 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


Computer skills are a moving target and hard to measure. Some of the stuff may not matter for some people. I remember seeing one that asked participants to use ftp. Not everyone needs to use ftp, so who cares.
But I'm glad this wasn't self-report!
posted by k8t at 1:43 PM on December 4, 2016


I'm not sure how this can be the case with the computer education I received, which every year required dutifully learning the difference between micro and minicomputers.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:45 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Most problems are not COMPUTER related at all.
They are thought related. Once the thought is correct, typing the computer code is a trivial boring task that just requires concentration so as not to make mistakes.

Any decent computer person will have spent a good 60% of his time sorting out the method and testing that, before writing a single line of code or even deciding if a computer method is the best way.

I have been on projects where vast amounts of bad code was written for a computer solution when the cheapest and most reliable solution did not use aa computer at all.
posted by Burn_IT at 1:46 PM on December 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


This is a long-running conversation: the "users don't know what they're doing" article, inevitably followed by the "developers and designers need to get over themselves and build things simple enough for the common people" article.

There's truth to both. But what both genres of article always lack is specific solutions.

Maybe that's because software design is just an inherently difficult problem, which always involves tradeoffs?

For example: in any software design, there's a push-and-pull between simplicity and featurefulness. Make things simple, and you make them more accessible to less sophisticated users – but power users will be frustrated. Make things featureful, and you can hugely increase the utility of the software to power users – but less savvy users will be overwhelmed. (This is true even if the features, and their UI, are well designed – any added functionality necessarily adds some complexity to the interface.) This need to cater to novices as well as power users is a big part of the problem.

Honestly, I think that personality differences account for a lot of the variance in technical ability. Computers, by their very nature, obey exactly one paradigm: logic. A piece of software, whether simple or complex, is nothing more (or less) than a logical system.

The user interacts with that logical system via a UI, and that UI may be brilliantly or poorly designed. But any piece of software will naturally be more intuitive and accessible to a person who is good at systems thinking: good at recognizing and exploiting patterns; proficient with deductive reasoning; in the habit of formulating and testing good hypotheses; able to synthesize a lot of heterogenous information to form a mental model of the underlying mechanics; able to see both fine-grained and big-picture contexts (and know when to switch their thinking from one to the other). Because that's what software is.

Designers can (and often should) tailor their UIs to make these patterns and mechanics more explicit, to focus on the most relevant details (instead of overwhelming the user with information that's likely extraneous to their goal), to be better at responding to common failure modes, etc. And that kind of good design can do a lot to make software more accessible to less technical users. But software is a tool – and every tool requires some investment from its user to learn proper principles and technique. If you insist on driving screws counterclockwise, or using a carpentry saw to cut rebar, you can't blame the tool.

tl;dr: If you're going to tell me that (users are dumb | software designers suck at their jobs), then I want to hear your specific solutions. Because, absent solutions, these articles always seem to be saying "let's dumb software down to the point where anyone can use it". And, as a power user, I don't accept that – software would become radically less useful to me if that happened. I rely on that complexity to get things done.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:54 PM on December 4, 2016 [18 favorites]


Design is always a tradeoff between making an internally consistent set of indicators vs. leaning on external conventions that users are familiar with from the wider web or OS. Do you use a disk glyph to indicate saving even though nobody has used a floppy disk in 15 years? Or use a garbage can to archive an email?
posted by benzenedream at 2:04 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Computers, by their very nature, obey exactly one paradigm: logic. A piece of software, whether simple or complex, is nothing more (or less) than a logical system.

This isn't wrong, but it leaves out an important component: state. A computer is state + logic. And in a modern computer, the amount of stored state is so immense as to be inconceivable by a human. When the state of the system gets into a place the engineers didn't expect, weird things start to happen -- things that can appear very illogical from the perspective of the user or even the application code itself. This is why, for instance, your computer could be doing its job, and you "don't change anything" and it suddenly stops working because e.g. you ran out of RAM and it started swapping memory to disk and applications begin to misbehave -- software hits internal timeouts or pieces of its state get removed (following logic that is entirely invisible to the user) to preserve the stability of the system as a whole. Running out of physical memory is a good, simple example because it illustrates that even though software lives in the world of logic, it is very much still a physical thing and the weirdness of the real world does seep into software systems.

Very often, the only way to get back to a known good state is to turn the thing off and on again. That's why that functions as such a cure-all. That's tech support saying "all the logic is correct but the state is unknown, so let's reset the system to a known good state." Hopefully the erroneous state isn't saved to disk and is removed during the reboot, or the problem persists across reboots.
posted by unknownmosquito at 2:32 PM on December 4, 2016 [38 favorites]


Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting

Wow a lot to deconstruct there, the actual article is probably pretty accurate although if you include snapchat like app's as "computers" there would probably be a differing skew to a new study, the tools that folks use are being taught on the street to each other by non-techie friends. Every smart phone is essentially a unix box.

Algorithmic thinking is more like writing a recipe than how many folks cook (mom always used a pinch...) and while one could make a case for too many cookbook writers, we have not had mass extinctions due to cooking like mom. Folks solve problems effectively with non-scientific procedures. Wrong wrong wrong, but still many go to bed with filled tummies.

IoT devices will exacerbate the interaction with computers not even being aware that it's actually a computer.

OMFGWASUIA kids should be required to know at graduation what an average and std dev is let alone grasping the idea of Big O notation. Complexity is a useful idea, should be taught in grade school.

Long ago,sigh, an early mac was available off in a corner and I'd boot it and poke around, made a folder with my name. Made me crazy that sometimes I could find the folder and other days not. Eventually I noticed an almost invisible bump that was the switch to the external drive. But before that mac it required a stack of manuals to do ANYTHING with a computer. We are going in many right directions, mixed in with an awful lot of not right, but the right ones are sticking.
posted by sammyo at 2:36 PM on December 4, 2016


SansPoint: Thanks for the links. You have an interesting couple of blog posts. I have always been a skills-based user and was the department superuser wherever I was before I moved into an applications implementation consulting role. I think the article to which the OP linked is drawing conclusions that are beyond the scope of what they tested. Most of the people I have worked with are able to perform their jobs if they have reasonable training, whether they are task-based or skills-based. I have met a few people in my non-work life who are clueless and say flat out they cannot/do not use computers.

For example, some years ago I took an Excel "test" at a temporary agency. I failed the test because the way I went about accomplishing the task was not exactly, keystroke for keystroke, what the test wanted. So how could my skills be judged? I have encountered very few software packages where there aren't multiple ways to do almost every task.

Regarding changes in UI/UX, one of the biggest challenges I encountered in consulting is getting people to focus on what they need to do and let go of how they used to do it. Any new software isn't going to look like the old software. And the complete disappearance of any printed manuals makes me crazy. While some interfaces are supposedly "intuitive" I often wonder to whom.

All that being said, I am as annoyed as anyone when Amazon or Netflix or whoever changes their interface. Almost every time, I find the interface less usable. I especially hate it when I can't move to a list-type interface, and sort things by reasonably common criteria, e.g., title. I don't want tiles. My Windows desktop only has one icon on it - the trash.
posted by Altomentis at 3:03 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


But the message to designers and developers that "you are not the customer" may reduce the frustration level of some poor "users" in the future.
posted by sammyo at 3:03 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I have been on projects where vast amounts of bad code was written for a computer solution when the cheapest and most reliable solution did not use aa computer at all.


Yes!!!
posted by Altomentis at 3:05 PM on December 4, 2016


Yeah, the tests seem odd. I can pop open a PowerBook or MBP like a spam tin & swap out a mother board or a hard drive, I'm a locally-known photoshop guru & probably the best digital color separator for screen printing in the state, who can teach you about who the ICC is and why color space is important in desktop publishing & how the ACE works to define color spaces across input & output devices, I can record & mix multi-track audio & push the finished stereo files to a website, but I have never once in my life scheduled an on-line meeting.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:08 PM on December 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


The metaphors involved in computer interaction are just totally opaque to some people. Sometimes that's because it's a stretch in the first place, sometimes because they are culturally specific (either culturally as in - white, western world, or culturally as in young middle-class male). So you get one group of users who just never grasp the metaphors, and therefore can't extend uses beyond the very specific tasks they have been taught to do. But more insidiously, I think, you get a second group of users who learn to expect computer use metaphors to be unnatural and convoluted, and not really quite the same as the real world thing on which the metaphor is based. And that second group is still scared to try 'natural' things, because they expect them not to work.

I recently launched a Virtual Reality exhibit at a museum and spent the opening weekend babysitting it and watching people interacting with it. Most people hadn't used VR before. I'm not going to suggest that my interface design was perfect - far from it - but one thing that a large number of users just didn't manage really surprised me, and that was turning their head to see more of the world.

That interaction isn't even a metaphor. It's exactly how the real world works. But people have been indoctrinated into the mindset that using a computer involves complicated keyboard or button-related tasks. And so even after I'd pointed out to people that they can turn their head left or right, or even turn all the way around, and they'd tried it under supervision, they'd go back to staring rigidly ahead, and mashing random buttons when they wanted to 'turn'.

I sometimes wonder if we've gotten in too deep into terrible interfaces to fix it for users now, even if we were to come up with simpler, more intuitive ones.
posted by lollusc at 3:08 PM on December 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


Someone at work needed me to check a list of widgets to see whether they were complete. So she sent me a list of asset IDs. Except - I am not making this up - it was a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document, emailed to me. Since I had to search for each (10 character) asset ID into a database to check it, I would have to retype each one and hope I didn't make a mistake. I just don't understand people who make things difficult for themselves, let alone others.
posted by AFABulous at 3:26 PM on December 4, 2016 [12 favorites]


While some interfaces are supposedly "intuitive" I often wonder to whom.

The people who have already gone through the learning process (and adapted to the interface's built-in quirks).
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:28 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Altomentis: Thanks! Your story makes a lot of sense. So many forms of pedagogy are based around "This is the way to do x, now go do x a hundred times until it sinks in." That way of teaching is useless for teaching someone how to use and understand a computer. The only advantage it has is being easier to test and grade, and, well, that's going to be enough for most people.

sammyo: But the message to designers and developers that "you are not the customer" may reduce the frustration level of some poor "users" in the future.

One way around this is to have a lot of user testing: not just other people in the company, but actual end-users. Problem is, this is expensive and time consuming as all-get-out. I remember begging the startup I worked for to bring people in so we could diagnose where in our endless multi-step sign-up process people were giving up, but they steadfastly refused, citing cost and time concerns.
posted by SansPoint at 3:34 PM on December 4, 2016


Given how email-centric the sample tasks are, maybe everyone could move up a group if Outlook weren't (a) obligatory and (b) a piece of shit whose bad design is never addressed because everyone is used to it because of (a).

I desperately want to punch in the face the guy who designed MS Outlook's unfathomable logic, but I've been told it's wrong to physically abuse the insane.

#msoutlook #outlooksucks #thunderbirdrocks
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:39 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I do user support and training for R1 university faculty. First lesson: a person can be blindingly brilliant, accomplished, and credentialed out the wazoo and still not know what a cursor is. Second lesson: everyone overestimates the computer literacy of the Youngs.
posted by soren_lorensen at 3:45 PM on December 4, 2016 [18 favorites]


Beyond skills-based and task-based learners I think there are "easily-frustrated" and "persistent" people. My father will work dawn to dusk to figure out an engine problem when he could just call the dealer, but he'll quit immediately if he can't attach a photo to an email. Whereas I'm self-taught in Photoshop but I will give up and order takeout if I can't understand a recipe. It's not necessarily that he's dumb with computers or I'm dumb with cooking, it's just that we don't perceive the knowledge to be that crucial, or we have a much easier option available. He can just call me for help, and I can just call Chinese Pagoda.
posted by AFABulous at 3:47 PM on December 4, 2016 [15 favorites]


Very often, the only way to get back to a known good state is to turn the thing off and on again. That's why that functions as such a cure-all. That's tech support saying "all the logic is correct but the state is unknown, so let's reset the system to a known good state."
This (as well as the RAM example) is one of the most succinct explanations for "power-off/power-on repair" by tech support I've ever seen. I've explained this idea to many people over the years, and I love being shown an even clearer way of putting it.
posted by mystyk at 3:49 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


AFABulous: Yeah, persistence is important to. I think people are more likely to approach learning something with a skill-based mindset when they care about learning it, while task-based learners just want to get the damn thing done so they can do something else they really care about. I mean, how many skills were you taught in school or at work where all you took away was just a set of instructions, and not the "why"? I know it was a lot for me.
posted by SansPoint at 4:00 PM on December 4, 2016


it was a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document, emailed to me

A client once wanted to send a webpage to me. Instead of simply pasting the link into the email, he printed out the webpage, scanned it back in as a PDF, and attached the PDF to the email.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:04 PM on December 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


I work in government and do a bit of tech support for my group (not my role, but I'm basically the only person able/willing to do it). The number of old farts who have worked in government for 40 years and don't know what is meant by "left click" is seriously revolting. These are the tools of your trade, and you've been using them for 25 years - same amount of time I have - and you don't know how to perform basic tasks with them? You are useless and need to retire.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:31 PM on December 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


Beyond skills-based and task-based learners I think there are "easily-frustrated" and "persistent" people.

I tinker less with tech than I used to. Part of that is just that as a grown person I have a lot less time than younger praemunire did. But part of that is that these days I often feel like tinkering is a task imposed upon me by bad/lazy/greedy design rather than the fun exploration of a system to figure out what cool stuff I can do with it. Probably my expectations have gone up--for some tasks, the kludginess that seemed understandable in 1992 seems unacceptable now. But I don't think that's all of it. I'll get "easily frustrated" in solving a problem if the problem itself seems stupid.
posted by praemunire at 4:38 PM on December 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


turbid dahlia: Both of my parents worked in government, and so did I for a stretch. If whatever group you're in is similar to what my folks or I did, the technology they were using 25 years ago had already been in place for at least a decade-plus: mainframes and dumb terminals to start. Even in 2010, when I worked for Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare, we were still using ancient, text-based mainframe systems, just running the terminal as a Windows app. They were just getting around to hiding the mainframe stuff behind a shiny web interface when I left.

So, yeah, a generation of government employees who trained on ancient, text and keyboard based mainframe systems through a terminal not getting left-click? No surprise at all.
posted by SansPoint at 4:43 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


2006: I'm a three!
2016: I'm just about getting the hang of the "fluent user" interface now, so maybe a two?


I live in a family of twos, I think. The main laptop used as the default house computer here had a hard drive failure six months ago and its replacement, unavoidably, has Windows 10, which knocked us all down a level. I feel brain cells dying each time I try to calculate where something formerly accessible from the Start menu might now be located.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:20 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


a) Computers and their various interfaces are designed badly. They are not obvious to use. They are the equivalent of a commercial double door, only one door of which is unlocked, with pull handles that actually require pushing, and you're supposed to know that, so someone has taped a sign over the handles saying, "Please push rather than pull the doors." And several times a day the techs comment loudly about how idiotic people are.
b) It is possible to use computers without knowing very much and without understanding how they work.
c) When I got my first personal computer (well, the first real one - the Commodore 64 didn't count), my husband swore he hated them and wouldn't touch mine. I had to get him his own a few months later because he had crashed my computer so many ways. He was working on some kind of metaphor of WordPerfect applied to DOS as a system. He continued to break his computer after that, until he had broken it so many ways that he became a computer consultant and continues to make good money at it even today in his late 60s.
d) I'm a Level 3 user. He's a Level 1 user at best. Still.
posted by Peach at 5:33 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


it was a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document, emailed to me

A client once wanted to send a webpage to me. Instead of simply pasting the link into the email, he printed out the webpage, scanned it back in as a PDF, and attached the PDF to the email.


I'm a level 3 user, but I understand totally how both of those things happened and can't really blame either person for what they did (but I can understand the frustration: I have a regular argument about whether an attachment that is all text and that was written 100% to send to me was necessary to be sent as a Word document or could have just been pasted into the fucking email like a civilized person).
posted by jeather at 5:46 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


has Windows 10, which knocked us all down a level. I feel brain cells dying each time I try to calculate where something formerly accessible from the Start menu might now be located.

I feel like there's been a general design move towards everything being "in the cloud" where their location is abstract rather than concrete (in a particular folder which you navigate to in a series of steps).

So in Windows 10, I have utterly given up on figuring out where anything is, I just click the Cortana button and type in the name of what I want. I actually have no more idea where anything is physically located anymore, if I want to start YAMB, I just type in YAMB and the application starts. If I want to change my mouse settings, I just type in mouse.

It's very similar to how when Google came online, we stopped navigating to www.wikipedia.com and then only searching for arrival the movie - we'd just open Chrome, and type into the search bar arrival movie wiki.

We went from command line interfaces into GUI, and users who grew up in either paradigm called the other dumb. From GUI we're taking the first step with Windows 10 into an abstract type Cortana / Siri / Google Now Virtual Intelligence interface (sorry, just watched the ME4 trailer).
posted by xdvesper at 5:48 PM on December 4, 2016 [10 favorites]


It is possible to use computers without knowing very much and without understanding how they work.

Inversely, I'm a person who understands computers pretty intimately. That doesn't mean that I know shit about how to make them do what you want me to make them do (i.e. Schedule a meeting for a conference room in outlook). In my office there are three very slightly overlapping circles - dev, tech and functional. The devs don't know much about how their software runs on a computer, or necessarily much about how to use it. Functional knows how to use the software, but has only a cargo cult understanding of how the software works and how it interacts with the computer. And tech may not even have a cargo cult cult understanding of how to use the software, or know much more about how the software works. But by god we can make it work on the computer.
posted by wotsac at 5:54 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


From level 3:
Unexpected outcomes and impasses are likely to occur.
So, I'm a level 3, definitely, and this suddenly made things make a little more sense as to why I have worked with so many people I considered so hopeless with computers. As long as they were following a very precise series of steps, maybe they were okay. But the moment something slightly unexpected happened, they'd freeze and stare at the screen like a deer in the lights of a UFO. So there was the office manager who became totally unable to check her webmail because the location of the link on her homepage moved slightly. When you're just somewhat afraid of the technology, when you think of computers as being a little bit magical, then you become afraid of doing something that might anger the proverbial gods.

There's a lot of stuff I'm not necessarily good at, but I can bash at it until it works. It doesn't matter if unexpected things happen. Even if my computer completely ceases booting, I have another machine to use as a backup to look up how to fix the first one.

I'm not sure everybody really needs to be able to do that kind of thing. But I think the world would be a much better place if we didn't have so many technology users who become completely unable to cope the first time they see an error message. The fact that people lack this kind of resilience in the face of problems strikes me as scarier than that they lack technical skills.
posted by Sequence at 6:27 PM on December 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


I'm pretty sure realizing that there's a difference between "contains a word matching 'sustain*'" and "is about sustainability" makes you at least a Level 3 in proficiency :-).

I suspect breaking people into 5 discrete buckets indicates that the original researchers score a Level 2 at best in statistics.
posted by nickzoic at 6:59 PM on December 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


I feel brain cells dying each time I try to calculate where something formerly accessible from the Start menu might now be located.

Download and install Classic Shell. I cannot use a Windows 8 or 10 PC without this (free!) accessory which puts all the stuff back where you learned it was in XP and 7.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:08 PM on December 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


the world would be a much better place if we didn't have so many technology users who become completely unable to cope the first time they see an error message.

I wonder how much of this comes not just from education, but from the kind of confidence that economic stability provides. Knowing you can always get another computer, or pay someone to extract data from your hard drive, or that if your paper or e-mail is somehow irretrievably lost it won't ruin your life gives you permission to click around.

I still remember having a boss who basically ordered me to mess up so that I'd get a bit more confidence in dealing with people. I think he did me a huge favor, although it was very confusing at the time.

There's an intro electronics book that I love because it starts out with a couple of "projects" that are basically all about destroying some (inexpensive) components. It would be awful if one didn't find the components cheap and utterly replaceable, but it's designed to let people feel in their bones that you can do stuff without worrying about it. This is necessary to get people to even try _anything_ at all; you can't really learn if you're hobbled by fear of messing up.
posted by amtho at 7:26 PM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm pretty sure realizing that there's a difference between "contains a word matching 'sustain*'" and "is about sustainability" makes you at least a Level 3 in proficiency :-).

Or an attorney who's ever been involved in e-discovery!
posted by praemunire at 7:31 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Did you guys hear the This American Life episode about Hillary Clinton's love for her Blackberry and how she doesn't use a desktop computer at all? It kind of blew my mind, but it makes sense that at a certain age and level of management, she had staff to handle it for her.
posted by olopua at 7:36 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm probably a level 2 unless I have access to Google.
posted by Reyturner at 7:52 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


amtho: This is necessary to get people to even try anything at all; you can't really learn if you're hobbled by fear of messing up.

Ah, yeah. Fear is a huge problem too. Popular culture is full of images of people destroying their computers through some ill-typed command. I mean, even among tech-savvy folks, the idea of someone typing
rm -rf /
as root on a UNIX system is enough to give them chills.

I think one reason iOS and Android devices have caught on so well is that it's a lot harder to do something that will utterly break your device. It's not impossible, but it's certainly a lot less likely.
posted by SansPoint at 8:30 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


"A client once wanted to send a webpage to me. Instead of simply pasting the link into the email, he printed out the webpage, scanned it back in as a PDF, and attached the PDF to the email."
I can think a couple dozen reasons why this makes sense. The PDF captured the webpage exactly as it was at that moment--before the site scrubbed the page or changed the price or corrected the error. Not every page gets saved by the Wayback Machine. I'd be more likely to do a screen grab or snap a photo of the page, but printing out the page isn't particularly backward.
Sending you a link could go to an error message.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:51 PM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


A client once wanted to send a webpage to me. Instead of simply pasting the link into the email, he printed out the webpage, scanned it back in as a PDF, and attached the PDF to the email.

This is what they do for webpages used as evidence in court as well.
posted by srboisvert at 8:59 PM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Gotanda, that reminds me of the time I sat down with my dad at his computer several years ago. I watched him open Internet Explorer (which used the MSN start page) and type in www.google.com in the search field. Once at Google, he entered the entire URL of the website he wanted to go to in the search field, and then proudly clicked the first result. This URL was written (along with dozens of others) on a physical notepad on his desk. I think he uses bookmarks now but I've pretty much just given up. He wants to do it the hard way, fine.
posted by AFABulous at 10:31 PM on December 4, 2016


I wonder if there's a name for those of us who while aware that we're no computer geniuses often find ourselves to be the most knowledgeable person present and so become the computer consultant of the moment. I've found myself in this situation for the last twenty years or thereabouts. In that time I've never been able to teach someone to right click to bring up a context menu, and I'm still trying to get my wife to understand the difference between a file and a program to open said file, etc.

My wife, btw, is not happy with the amount of time I spend online, though much of it is in learning how to keep the damned computers running.

I don't know nothing...
posted by metagnathous at 10:38 PM on December 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


it was a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet embedded in a Word document, emailed to me

A client once wanted to send a webpage to me. Instead of simply pasting the link into the email, he printed out the webpage, scanned it back in as a PDF, and attached the PDF to the email.


The mother of a friend once took a capture of her screen, pasted it into Word, took a photograph of the screen with her phone and sent the picture to her daughter.
posted by snakeling at 1:13 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've been at least a 3 on MacOS for 25 years now. But I use Windows in the classroom, and I know what it feels like to be clueless about navigating an OS as a result.

Worse comes to worse and I can figure out how to do it in unix on a mac.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:23 AM on December 5, 2016


It's not that people are bad at computers.

It's that computers are bad at people.
posted by pracowity at 2:27 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't have the first clue how I could determine which percentage of the emails were *about* sustainability. I'd have to read each email and make some determination of what it was about, based on a definition of the term sustainability. (I assume that some emails would be about sustainability without explicitly using the term.) Am I missing something?

If I were doing this test, it being a test set by computer people to test computer literacy, I'd assume it's as simple as finding the emails with "sustainability" in the subject. Because that's what goes in the subject field, right, the thing the email is about? (Notwithstanding that that is not how email works in practice some 95% of the time).
posted by Dysk at 3:47 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm a high school computer apps teacher, I think 5% is a bit high. I'm continually amazed by the lack of computer skills seniors in high school have. I guess my kids were outliers as they've always been interested in computers and are very well versed. Alas, back to teaching "click file, then click save...etc....etc...etc...."
posted by damnitkage at 4:26 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I watched him open Internet Explorer (which used the MSN start page) and type in www.google.com in the search field. Once at Google, he entered the entire URL of the website he wanted to go to in the search field, and then proudly clicked the first result. This URL was written (along with dozens of others) on a physical notepad on his desk. I think he uses bookmarks now but I've pretty much just given up. He wants to do it the hard way, fine.
People keep talking about our kids being "digital natives," but my affluent, well-educated, privileged, computer-savvy sixth graders did the same thing.

I continue to worry that people are missing the point. There's some very bad design at the heart of this problem; it isn't just that people are dumb. Good design looks at the way people actually think and act (human beings are not rational in the reductive metaphor we use for rationality, which does not make them stupid) and designs things with affordances that make them easy to use.

For instance, the fact that icons on a desktop require double-clicks and links on a website require single clicks (except when the system is running slow, in which case my tech-savvy sixth graders clicked at least seventeen times) is not obvious. What makes one little doodad different from another one that is usually blue, unless the web designer thought purple was prettier?

I use bookmarks heavily, but I can't get my students to use them. It's not intuitive to organize your life that way, even though for those of us who use them (or who have our browsers configured to open to the most common websites) they are invaluable.

There are too many choices, too many ways of doing the same thing. That's not a bad thing (I like being able to go down a level when things freeze up and hack from below) but all those choices are there at the surface.

Google's interface, whether you type in "google.com" or have a little window in whatever browser you use, is intuitively designed and it works the way human beings think it should. There's a box. It's a clean box. You can put things in it, and other things come out, usually the "right" kind of things. You type something into it, and it gives you the result you want. Likewise, phone apps tend to operate intuitively, even the ones that are weirdly designed (Snapchat) because they restrict your choices.

But who decides what our choices should be? And there's the problem.
posted by Peach at 4:51 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Computer skills is the wrong framing. What society needs is computer literacy—a basic, fundamental level of knowledge and understanding of computation and related technologies so that individuals can make informed, critically-evaluated choices about how they use tools and be aware of the impact of these particular choices. This is important, because users are really just consumers and citizens.
posted by polymodus at 5:17 AM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Design right now absolutely does a shit job of helping users gain any clue how bad a particular error might be, what that error is actually about, places to look (or actions to take) to remedy the error, or even so little as allowing a process for a user to recover an error message they missed or glossed over before and then advertising that process to the user.

I can't speak for all software developers, of course, but I still feel pretty comfortable saying that if the author of the software could explain to the user how to remedy the error, or what it was actually about in such layman's terms, that they would have just gone ahead and dealt with the error instead of throwing a dialog box.

Error dialogs fit very well into the context of this article. They are admissions of "Welp, I--smart programmer that understands the problem domain--can't or won't figure this out. I'm punting.. Let's see if you can do any better! LOL."
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 6:18 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Digital natives" is a bunch of hooey, in my experience working with both middle schoolers (at a science and technology magnet) and college students. Every time I hear someone use that term, I immediately just assume that person is so technologically inexperienced that they think posting on Facebook or taking a picture with one's phone is the high point of technical wizardry. Because kids are real good at mobile devices, to be sure. They're not rooting their phones or anything, but they can use Android and iOS apps for their intended purposes. But I've done technology surveys with non-STEM undergrads and their technical capabilities basically stop there. Their computers are still for the most part just seen as magic boxes where when you click the thing, Netflix happens.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:21 AM on December 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


Honestly — and for transparency I've been a ux designer and then dev for many years now — the idea that computers are magic needs to die. Like, yes, it is a tool, designed by idiots just like us; you need to learn how to use it. Expecting it to just know is how you get weird creepy surveillance tools (because it doesn't just know! it hoovers up data to make a more educated guess).

If we want to have low-option machines and high-option machines (or phones and laptops), that seems reasonable enough. My phone drives me nuts sometimes for lack of access to the file system but I get it and I can do anything complex I need to do on my laptop, so that is cool.

Maybe we should bring back secretaries (and pay them better) and then just let the people who get the tech do the machine operating. Bump up those employment numbers with chill office jobs again.

But this idea that because there is a learning curve means designers are failing, because the point of intelligent machines is to intelligently anticipate everything I might need, is not good for us. Be curious. Figure stuff out. That's how I learned to use computers and I don't think designers need to be responsible for others' lack of curiosity. We do need to be responsible for supporting the curious and I think that is an interesting conversation. But cranky old Don Norman can get bent.
posted by dame at 6:48 AM on December 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


I suspect that some of the reason "digital natives" has so much currency is that some of us are, so we think that other people are too.

I hit the internet at a time when people were just coming online in large numbers--an early adopter, but not a pioneer. The guts hadn't been completely covered up with "intuitive" interfaces yet. For example, if you wanted your own website, not only did you have to write it, you had to learn whatever clumsy upload method your host used, and understand basic file structure to know where all the pieces should go. Now you've got Facebook and Tumblr.

I'm sure other people came online around the same and avoided learning much. But I would be interested to see how familiarity with computing metaphors / general design principles tracks with changes in design, among heavy users.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:50 AM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Maybe we should bring back secretaries (and pay them better) and then just let the people who get the tech do the machine operating.
That's an interesting point: now, all office workers are expected to be able to do tasks that were considered specialized secretarial work a generation or two ago. And people got trained for secretarial tasks, either in high school or in secretarial school, whereas we expect office workers now just to pick up that stuff on the fly.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:08 AM on December 5, 2016 [12 favorites]


Oh, man, oh man ... I have too much to say.

First of all the whole "youbng'uns know computers!" is completely false. It's 30-=40 year olds, those of us who grew up having to set IRQ's and MEM who know computers. And then we made them into fisher price toys which 'just work' ... until they don't and then the kiddy who can use an app or facebook or whatever just has no background of finding a solution to the problem is stumped because they never had the training to do all that problemsolving!

Which brings me very neatly to the problem of computer use, UI and UX.

Which is a myth and is handled COMPLETELY wrong by almost every UI/UX guru.

The main problem is that they have this STUPID mantra of 'if the user can't figure it out, the UI/UX is bad'.

NO!

A UI/UX anyone can figure out can only be used for simple tasks which can be done in the fashion of the UI/UX they were trained on. Cases in point are PalmPilot's Grafiti and Win10.

The thing is, great textinput on a computer was SOLVED by PalmPilot: the fastest way to get great written text input on a device was to train the user in a way to use the computer which gave the deired effect in the fastest way possible. But it did have to be learned.

A GREAT UI/UX does the thing you need in the fastest possible way. And the more complex, the more it might be that the use must be learned. You have to train the user. Because doing it the 'simple' way just is not fast enough.

The solution is NEVER to implicitly think johny/jany manager can use the tools or teach themselves or asume the tools must be simple to use ... it is to train them to use the tools (and if they can't do that well ... fire them because they cannot do their job).

And that is also why Win10 is horrible .. .because not only does it discard the years of training in OS use, but it also is inconsistent on all levels (and contains UI/UX from all OS versions) AND a power user cannot go to a root level to any task, but must go through sometimes three different-but-same-but-not menu's to find the exact function they were looking for. And in the case of for example creating a new local account, IT CANNOT BE FOUND EXCEPT FOR TYPING IN A SHELL COMMAND!!!!

Oh, and @Altomentis: I have my desktop filled with links and use a program called Shelves to corral them so that I can start up almost any task with just one mouse movement and click: THAT is speed and efficiency. People who call my desktop cluttered ALWAYS take more time to start something new up.
posted by MacD at 7:15 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Computers are the only complex tool that we expect users to be able to use with no explicit training. Cars are a good deal less complex but we typically expect people to spend at least a few weeks learning how to use them.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:29 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yesterday I played Minecraft with my son. He was interested in the server (running Debian). He asked if he could shut it down when we were done. It was the first time he had ever entered anything on a command line. I was thinking he needs more of that.

The less the kid thinks of a computer as a magic box, the better. I want to let him take one apart and look at the guts. Pick a distro and install it. Dink around in the command line. Build something that does something else.

He's working with Lego Mindstorms at school, he's played with Scratch Jr. on an iPad, he's got high mathematics aptitude and skills for his age range. I don't want to see him grow up to be LESS proficient at computers than I am.

At home I have available:
1) An old blueberry iBook (works, running 10.3 I think)
2) A ruggedized laptop running WinXP (inherited from a friend)
3) A Raspberry Pi (would rather not muck with, it's running as our home AirPrint server)
4) 2 CHIPs - one with the PocketCHIP add on, the other floating loose
5) An ultracompact PC running Debian Jesse (our Minecraft server)
6) 4 newer Macs (PPC Mini, 2010 iMac, and two newer MPBs)

...given the above, what's the best way to start letting him muck around and make a mess of things? My thoughts were - disassemble 1 and/or 2, to look at parts then rebuild; play on command line with 4, maybe try some web coding on 6 (as each has an in-built Apache server)...?
posted by caution live frogs at 7:41 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Totally number six with the caveat of a tiny lecture on what root versus user access is. I'm thinking if he's got the GUI bits as a life raft to paper over the frustrations a bit, it'll keep him from getting discouraged too fast. It should be adequate that the command line can do so many more things than the stupid mouse can.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 7:49 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Or, silly me, a solid backup before you set him loose minus the lecture on root vs user.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 7:50 AM on December 5, 2016


I am a computer programmer. Literally my job is to sit and write instructions for the automation of tasks by a digital computing machine. I have been doing this professionally for ten years, and in an informal capacity for twenty. And yet, considering these two problems:

[S]chedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.
[Determine] what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.


I don't think I could accomplish either of them.

If your organization is so deeply fucked that its email and room booking systems are disparate entities, it doesn't matter whether you book the room correctly or not; you're going to get there and someone's going to be using it, and you're going to glare angrily at each other.

"About sustainability?" Like, contained the partial word "sustainab"? Or made reference to a known list of project names, and didn't misspell them? Sure, I can write you a nice regex that'll find them. God help you if you're using Outlook or whatever, because it probably used some custom regular expression library that's impenetrable to most humans, but I can probably whip something up. But phrasing the question like that makes it sound like you're a level 2 user yourself, Smug Article From Nielson Norman Group.
posted by Mayor West at 7:53 AM on December 5, 2016


I do IT in public education. Very few teachers will take the effort to learn how to do something tech related on their own time. If it's not formal professional development provided by the school district and they are not compensated they will not learn it.
posted by judson at 7:59 AM on December 5, 2016


Maybe I'm actually a level 1 but I can't find an Outlook message from a particular person unless I type in their entire first or last name - it doesn't do wildcards. So if I'm looking for something from Benedict Cumberbatch I can't just type in "from:Ben" or "from:Ben*" in the search field. God help me if I don't remember how to spell a name. (Chaudhary vs. Chaudry vs. Chaudhari vs. Chauhdri messes me up every time.)
posted by AFABulous at 8:11 AM on December 5, 2016


(Vent warning) Re IT in education: As a tech-savvy teacher, I can tell you I was often too darned busy to bother with the wonderful learning opportunities offered by our IT coordinators (and they were indeed wonderful) during the school year. I mostly taught myself things during the summer.

Not only that, when I brought a problem to their attention, I can't tell you how many times their first reaction was a kindly attempt to teach me how to use the tool (which I was using correctly), their second reaction was to tell me the problem had been fixed already, and their last reaction (usually several iterations later) was, "Huh. That doesn't work." The problem quite often did not get fixed anyway (for instance, the volume issue in my projection system, which hung on for several years), because they were too darned busy too and did not have a big enough budget to provide real help.
posted by Peach at 8:12 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


A GREAT UI/UX does the thing you need in the fastest possible way. And the more complex, the more it might be that the use must be learned. You have to train the user.

Suggestion: when determining "fastest possible way," figure in that training time. Weighted in accordance with the unimportance/infrequency of the task.
posted by praemunire at 8:54 AM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


...given the above, what's the best way to start letting him muck around and make a mess of things?

The state of computer education today makes me very sad, because back in the day; to get a computer to do anything at all required typing in some (probably broken) junk from Compute! magazine.

We had fairly low expectations of what a computer could, or should, do. ... so anything at all was a thrill! (c.f. "10 PRINT "FOO" 20 GOTO 10)


Now, you can't just hand a kid a computer and some books, because their Minimal Acceptable Standard is shit like "connects to the internet and plays funny cat videos". They don't want to spend three hours debugging a BASIC program from a magazine that results in Pong.



... So, with that in mind, my suggestion would be to go with option 5 or option 6a..
Option 5 being "Let the kid screw with the minecraft server. It works NOW. Anything the kid does that makes it not work, well, that's a learning experience, because it worked at one point!" and Minecraft is spectacular for making kids want to tinker...

Option 6a, is give the kid full access to a modern system and a modern programming environment (python or something) and hope for the best. I'm personally less fond of this, because modern full-function computers can easily devolve into "Just Watching Funny Videos"..

Most kids these days don't seem to be interested in getting past the inherent issues involved in trying to make a Raspberry Pi do anything at all, so i'd skip that stuff.. that's for more advanced/weird/special kids that already know things and have decided they want to be masters of computers. (this sorting function was likely implicit in early computing)
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 9:25 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm a level 3 user and yet, all these skills earn me is a shitty admin salary. So whoopdee fuckin' doo.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:31 AM on December 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


I do IT in public education. Very few teachers will take the effort to learn how to do something tech related on their own time.

In fairness to them, teaching's the most physically exhausting job I've ever had, and that includes factory/farm/retail/service work. I pretty much have no idea how anyone manages to keep doing it for more than a year or two.

Besides, just like with any job, if employers require a particular skill that wasn't part of the hiring process, they should arrange for the training and compensate workers for the time spent on it. For all the complaining I see about workers' ineptness with computers (and all the complaining I do myself) there's very little investment in training.
posted by asperity at 10:44 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


"So if I'm looking for something from Benedict Cumberbatch I can't just type in "from:Ben" or "from:Ben*" in the search field."

What if you type in:

from:(Ben*)
posted by I-baLL at 10:47 AM on December 5, 2016


I can't find an Outlook message from a particular person unless I type in their entire first or last name - it doesn't do wildcards.

Outlook (at least, Outlook 2010, which I'm stuck with at work) does have an advanced find feature that can do this -- keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-F. Otherwise this feature's available in the Search Tools menu that shows up in the Search ribbon tab that shows up when you've got the search text entry box active (click in it, or Ctrl-E.)

Oh, and you've got to use the Advanced tab in that advanced find window to search for strings embedded within words, apparently. Easy, right?
posted by asperity at 10:51 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


there's very little investment in training.

That's the root of the problem, in a nutshell.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:06 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


What if you type in:

from:(Ben*)


This does work with no need for the asterisk, and Outlook will auto-format the search for you if you start typing in the search box and use the arrow keys to select one of the field options (or click on it). Except that it doesn't work if you've typed in characters that confuse it, like hyphens.

Frustrating. Pine was easier to search with.

Oh, and searching with Outlook is a ridiculously large component of more than one job I've had, because nobody can be bothered to pay for/set up/consistently use decent project management software, so workflows are just all email all the time. Knowing stupid Outlook tricks helps me do my job(s) faster, but doesn't really improve things overall, since nobody else knows how to use them. Everybody else just asks me to email the things I find back to them (even when they were included on those emails.)

It's a living. I guess.
posted by asperity at 11:10 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


You have to train the user.

For those suggesting training as (or at least as part of) the answer, what does that training look like? Because, while I could imagine someone teaching a seminar/lab on how to use the search functionality in Outlook, it's harder for me to get a handle on how to teach people to realize that they even need to figure out how to use the search functionality.

As an example: this weekend, I was futzing about with an Arduino project. Specifically, I needed the board to go to sleep and wake on an interrupt. I googled, and found a few conflicting code samples/tutorials, so I went with the simplest one (not a bad rule of thumb). No dice. More googling, and wondering if using an ATTiny vs. an ATMega is making some kind of a difference led me to the conclusion that yeah, the more complicated code was more complicated for a reason, so I start working at understanding which bits I need, which I don't, and which I have to change because my (hardwired) pinouts don't match the example. More tinkering, and viola!

So, if getting Arduino-based devices to sleep was part of my job description, did I fail at it because I had to go look for help? What training should an employer have given me to prevent that failure? Was I "successful" because I worked it out? What skills do I have* that allowed for that? And how do you teach them?

At least one comment above makes the same point as this meme: What if I told you that Tech Support uses Google to answer your questions? It seems to me like the level of problem solving skills required to look for answer, sort through a set of possibilities, and synthesize a possible custom solution to a problem are really what makes the difference between Level 1 and Level 3 users.

And spending time/effort/money on training that seems like it would better serve all involved, as opposed to trying to adapt (for example) the Outlook UI to every idiosyncratic snowflake, or spend weeks forcing people into mostly unnecessary training to cover every possible contingency of their job.

*I mean, I have a degree in software engineering which definitely helped with, say, being able to parse the sample code and figured out that it was setting GIMSK incorrectly that was crashing the sketch. But degrees in software engineering are very much not required for Arduino development.
posted by sparklemotion at 11:31 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


"This does work with no need for the asterisk, and Outlook will auto-format the search for you if you start typing in the search box and use the arrow keys to select one of the field options (or click on it)"

Except that AFABulous said that it wasn't working for them. So that's why I asked.
posted by I-baLL at 11:33 AM on December 5, 2016


I'm a level 3 user and yet, all these skills earn me is a shitty admin salary. So whoopdee fuckin' doo.

That would be because pay is not based on the usefulness of skills, but in proximity to the center.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 12:02 PM on December 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


For those suggesting training as (or at least as part of) the answer, what does that training look like?

The skill-based vs. task-based orientation comments up above elucidated a lot for me because I have a pretty good idea how I'd like to do training, but the fact of the matter is that the people I train do not, for the most part, actually give a shit about the skills. They want to do the tasks. If they had someone to do the tasks for them, that'd be even better (which is why we get a fair amount of grad students and admin staff in our LMS training workshops).

The clients I get with a skills-based orientation make my day. That's the training I want to do. I find it fascinating because I'm entirely self-taught and trying to figure out how I did that interests me. But that's not usually the training I have to do because that's not what is desired by the vast majority of our clients. It's all down to what people want to do with their limited time. I like computers and I like using them (god help me) so when something new and shiny rolls across my desk, I want to dive in and start kicking the tires, because that's what I do for fun.

I do try to shoe-horn in some more general skills knowledge into my workshops. I find that my colleagues don't do this so much, but I really like to start off trainings by just displaying the UI and giving things names and letting people get used to just navigating around it. This is the logout button. We call this the "context menu" because what's in it changes based on the context of where you're accessing it from. This is your control panel. It at least makes them easier to support in the future if they call us and can say "I'm not finding what I expect in the context menu" instead of "The thingie next to the thingie isn't doing what I want." Or they can Google it! Because yeah, I am completely unashamed at the amount of googling I do for client support. I'll do it right in front of them if we're having a face-to-face meeting because this is the secret sauce I wish more people knew about. Google that shit. If you still can't find the answer, give me a call, we'll figure it out.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:17 PM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Except that AFABulous said that it wasn't working for them. So that's why I asked.

I meant the syntax you used does work -- it won't without the parentheses.
posted by asperity at 12:18 PM on December 5, 2016


My husband can read email but cannot respond. He also says "download" when he means "print". Somebody told him, "Dude, it's like it's 1935 and you don't know how to read!" Which is so totally true. (However, he's a very awesome bass player.)
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 1:10 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


That would be because pay is not based on the usefulness of skills, but in proximity to the center.

While bitterness was my main point, my secondary point is - what's the motivation to have good computer skills when you can pay someone else crap wages to have them for you?
posted by Squeak Attack at 1:13 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I meant the syntax you used does work -- it won't without the parentheses.

And on trying it again, I can get it to work without the parentheses. Welp.
posted by asperity at 1:28 PM on December 5, 2016


(However, he's a very awesome bass player.)

Well, there's his problem!
Note: I am also a bass player, though not necessarily awesome
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:17 PM on December 5, 2016


Forgive me if my perspective if off-base or incorrect. I read this article a couple of days ago and read the comments in between supporting end-users with computer issues.

I agree with many above who dislike the methodology of the research. I am not exactly sure that the questions asked were testing computer knowledge or know-how, per se, versus how to solve a problem.

On the other hand, it seemed like the problems were similar to problems one would expect someone to be able to know how to do, if they are expected to use a computer all day, every day.

I had actually been thinking about sending this article to my boss, in the hopes that it would assist our team in the best way to help end-users. I had a few takeaways that are not exactly clear from the article.

1. If you support users, odds are, they know very little about what they are actually doing. I think most tech support people understand that implictly. With the numbers shown in the research, it is a good explicit reminder of the situation. If you can, take the time to show them a process-based way of doing things versus task-based. Or, even just some basic problem solving.

2. If you are designing the software, understand most users want the quickest, easiest thing and the biggest darn button possible to make sure the task is completed correctly. They want the computer to just get out of the way and do what it is supposed to.

3. As many have mentioned here, you may be level 3, and then you may drop to level 1, if changes are made. When designing, always assume someone is level 1 and design accordingly. You can nest advanced commands somewhere, but assume a certain (to our minds) very low level of tech knowledge and choose sane defaults.

And, yeah. Y'all who deal with people who are very, very smart in their field but have trouble even logging in, I feel your pain.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 4:49 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


what's the motivation to have good computer skills when you can pay someone else crap wages to have them for you?

Lack of jobs. This is a false scarcity. I'm pissed too.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:54 PM on December 5, 2016


I'd gently encourage trying to move into development work if you've got the flexibility to take some risks. I don't know if any money can be made without succumbing to the siren call of police state tools, but I am going to try anyways.

I just recently learned my sister will be having a child. I'm part of a dying line, and the thought of the one young family member I have growing up in the world dealing with this cyberpunk dystopia is radicalizing me. It's a lot like Snowden that way.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 5:00 PM on December 5, 2016


When I read the article, I was pretty sure it wasn't directed at me. I'm a user, not a designer/coder. So I forwarded it to a friend who is in "Knowledge Management" at a law firm. He just responded:

"I had a secretary call me for her password? Password - I don't do passwords. She insisted her error message said call your site administrator. I jumped on her computer and she was at Sherwin-Williams' paint store website."
posted by janey47 at 5:27 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I grabbed a cluster of 40+ people across the age, gender, and cultural spectrum this summer and taught them to use this.

My field is translation. Clients have a bajillion platforms, payment systems, CAT tools, website design & UI are things we have to deal with, you have to put the new words you make in lots of different mediums...you have to be a Level 2 at least. "Task" and "skill" learning both work, but even as tasks, much of what you do is too complicated to memorize, and the problems you encounter too obscure or "higher-order" for there to be much documentation for computer beginners (say, remote termbase management through TRADOS or something, vs. creating a new document in Word, the internet is full of step-by-step instructions). You at least need to know how to open the hood and change the oil before you can follow an instruction manual on how to change the spark plug.

Long story short, this summer taught me that a good chunk of my market value isn't my language skills, it's that I can install and use the tools for the job without too much fuss. A lot of people can't. The youngs were as hapless as the olds, and the Mac people were especially...unlearned. That's not to say they can't learn, they learned pretty quickly, but baseline knowledge was low and there was a lot more frustration than I expected.

Financial literacy, 'cause I had to pay my freelancers? Same. "What's a SWIFT code?" "What's the difference if you pay me from a Merchant account?" "Ok, I'm in the UK and I downloaded Venmo, what next?" People make things work for their immediate needs and then just...stop.

I know that impulse! I haven't bought new pajamas in 8 years. But c'mon! I understand the dentists now.
posted by saysthis at 7:26 PM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Now I'm left trying to figure out the connection between pajamas and dental care.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:46 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Now I'm left trying to figure out whether that's better or worse than "dental floss made from used clothes".
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:23 PM on December 5, 2016


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posted by mazola at 10:32 PM on December 5, 2016


There appears to be a nut loose behind the keyboard.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:45 PM on December 5, 2016


So I forwarded it to a friend who is in "Knowledge Management" at a law firm.

I guess this could vary by firm, but Knowledge Management doesn't generally refer to knowledge about computers/IT.
posted by praemunire at 10:59 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


[S]chedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.

I assume this means:
1) wade through an email chain or cluster of email chains wherein people mention their available hours;
2) pick an hour that doesn't clash with anyone's 'I can't do that' time;
3) meanwhile, collect everyone's email addresses on a list somewhere (Notepad by preference; reply email that I won't be sending if that's not available);
4) open calendar/booking app & set meeting for that hour;
5) paste in list of addresses to be notified of meeting.

This is tedious but, if you're computer-savvy, not difficult - the problem's less likely to be with the scheduling than with Larry from Accounting who always says he can make meetings "any time" and doesn't mention, "oh, but Tuesdays I leave at 3." Maybe the booking app has only partial schedules available, in which case, there's an extra step of having that calendar visible while sorting through the emails to match people's availability - but in a computer test, as opposed to real-life office settings, you can be fairly confident that there will be an hour in which the criteria can be met, and you will not have to ask the west-coast person to come in an hour early for a phone conference with the German team, who will be staying an hour late for the meeting.

[Determine] what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.

Being that this is a computer usability test and not a philosophy exam, I assume they mean the percentage of emails that either have "sustainability" in the subject line, or somewhere in the body text.

The most frustrating thing in dealing with Level 1 computer users is having to tell them, over and over, (as politely as possible), that whatever task they've called me to help with, there's probably a menu that does that for them.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:35 AM on December 6, 2016



I grabbed a cluster of 40+ people across the age, gender, and cultural spectrum this summer and taught them to use this.


Speaking of subtitles! Like all publicly funded educational institutions, we are required by law to provide accessible educational resources. Which includes subtitles on all instructional videos, of which there are a lot. There's no money available in most departments to hire people to do this so instructors must do it themselves. But try as we might to provide copious documentation and trainings and resources to help folks use the available technology to do this (which basically boils down to "use YouTube"), no one will do it because it's just too hard (it's not that hard if you pay attention to our recommendations for best practices and use the tools YouTube provides) and no one cares enough and honestly it infuriates me. If you can't be bothered to learn the tasks for your own sake, how about for the sake of your disabled and ESL students? But wow some people get really bloody minded when they're told they should use an unfamiliar technology. But it's kind of a legal and ethical imperative in this case and I really lose my chill over this topic.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:48 AM on December 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you can't be bothered to learn the tasks for your own sake, how about for the sake of your disabled and ESL students? But wow some people get really bloody minded when they're told they should use an unfamiliar technology. But it's kind of a legal and ethical imperative in this case and I really lose my chill over this topic.

I maintain that if you're unable or unwilling to use the technologies necessary for your job, you're morally obligated to get able or willing or get another job. Used to see it in university tech support a lot- people who thought they were qualified for a job because they assumed we'd do the half of their workload that involved interacting with computers for them. Infuriating.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:58 AM on December 6, 2016


Oh, dear, I got derailed, but good luck getting more teachers to fill the spots of teachers who are leaving the profession. Telling people they are "morally obligated" to learn new technological tasks on top of their existing obligations is just shaming and is already part of why it is a less and less desirable profession. Yeah, I know busy teachers are annoying in their resistance to learning new things, and I too got fed up with colleagues who couldn't learn, but it's a far more complex and demanding job than it looks like from the outside, and the longer you do it, the harder and more demanding it gets because you keep adding new things to your list of necessaries.

I'm speaking as someone who retired from teaching last year because it had become impossible to take good physical care of myself any more (and I have no chronic health issues other than age), so take my comments with a grain of salt.
posted by Peach at 6:16 AM on December 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


I have a masters in Teaching and taught middle and high school. My husband was also a high school English teacher for 6 years and left the profession for the same reasons as you, Peach.

These are university faculty that we're discussing here, engaging in an activity that is right off the bat voluntary (no one is making them create lecture capture or instructional videos--though we do encourage this kind of pedagogical innovation and provide assistance in any way we can). But they're only going half-way: they make the video but then don't caption it. This is actually not just an ethical issue but a legal timebomb because at any point someone could sue, as has happened to multiple other institutions over the years.

The process to caption is laid out in documentation (including screen capture videos demonstrating each step). We try to urge people to consider this stuff before they make their videos. There's a lot of stuff you can do that will make captioning take 15 minutes of your time, if you know about it beforehand. (I.e. please for the love of god use a script, no one wants to hear your uhs and ums while you ramble over a bunch of PowerPoints, and as a bonus, if you have a script you can just upload that to YouTube and let the voice recognition automagically sync it to the audio and you've fulfilled your legal obligations in a matter of minutes, shazzam!).

No student is legally obligated to divulge their disabilities to their instructors. My attempts to tell instructors that they should probably behave as if they have students with disabilities in their classes already (because they probably do) rather than force a student with a disability to disclose in order to get an equal educational experience has in the past been met with some pretty shocking scorn.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:35 AM on December 6, 2016 [8 favorites]


I'd gently encourage trying to move into development work if you've got the flexibility to take some risks.

Personally, I'm a woman *and* almost 50, so if you mean software development, I don't think that would work for me. I'll just continue to be a very highly skilled computer user amongst a class of workers who basically replaced secretaries, and are therefore paid on a scale that assumes little to no specialized knowledge.
posted by Squeak Attack at 1:44 PM on December 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


2. If you are designing the software, understand most users want the quickest, easiest thing and the biggest darn button possible to make sure the task is completed correctly. They want the computer to just get out of the way and do what it is supposed to.

Easier said than done. It's relatively easy to design an intuitive interface to perform one very specific task, but most of the programs discussed here are designed to be capable of being used for a wide range of tasks, and/or tasks that are inherently complicated. There's also the related problem of people using programs to accomplish tasks the program wasn't designed to accommodate, like using Word to write an email, or using Excel to store a database.
posted by shponglespore at 3:18 PM on December 6, 2016


> In my office there are three very slightly overlapping circles - dev, tech and functional. The devs don't know much about how their software runs on a computer, or necessarily much about how to use it. Functional knows how to use the software, but has only a cargo cult understanding of how the software works and how it interacts with the computer. And tech may not even have a cargo cult cult understanding of how to use the software, or know much more about how the software works. But by god we can make it work on the computer.

I remember the first time somebody sat me down to use a computer program I had written. It was a fairly complicated bit of code to track rents etc on a bunch of rental properties. The person who usually entered the data was out for a while, "So hey, you wrote the thing, why don't you just sit down and enter the data & print the reports?"

It didn't help that I had written & tested it about a year before, and it was written in Applesoft Basic for an Apple ][, which required a lot of cludgy work-arounds for basic things we would handle a lot differently today.

Anyway, suffice it to say, my career in data entry did not go well . . .
posted by flug at 12:17 PM on December 7, 2016


Also, the entire system was replaced by a few spreadsheets a couple of years later--after some geniuses invented and marketed the spreadsheet for Apple ][.
posted by flug at 12:20 PM on December 7, 2016


Because yeah, I am completely unashamed at the amount of googling I do for client support. I'll do it right in front of them if we're having a face-to-face meeting because this is the secret sauce I wish more people knew about.

Totally. I'll be sitting with someone (e.g. my mom) at their computer and they'll ask me "how do I..." and I'll literally open Google and type "how do I..." Then it's a conversation about reliable sources vs. junk.

Bar none, the most useful class I've ever taken in my 18 years of formal education was Critical Thinking in high school. It didn't have anything to do with computers, but it taught me how to think, evaluate information, and teach myself anything I like. It should be a required class for everyone. I think the recent election would have gone a lot differently...
posted by AFABulous at 1:17 PM on December 7, 2016 [7 favorites]


"The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit."
I've had that job. Sometimes I still sit in those meetings.
posted by soelo at 2:55 PM on December 8, 2016


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