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Exactly. I think the fundamental disconnect is between people who see an unfamiliar user interface and immediately try to figure it out, and people who see an u

by pjscott 16y ago

Exactly. I think the fundamental disconnect is between people who see an unfamiliar user interface and immediately try to figure it out, and people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!". Obviously it's not as sharp a dichotomy as that, but it definitely exists. A lot of people learn to use computers by memorizing a sequence of steps which, if followed exactly, will produce the right result. To send an email, first double-click on the "internet", then click "bookmarks", then "send an email", then press "compose", then type the email address of the recipient into the field, and so on. This is a very brittle kind of knowledge, and if the computer goes off-script, people who've been trained to interact with computers this way tend to just fail, hard. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, because for most of these people, learning how to figure things out on a computer would be a lot of work for not much immediate gain. Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring.

ams6110 16y ago
people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!" Or sometimes people see an unfamiliar UI, think "ugh---yet another drain on my time to figure this out", consider the value of what they are trying to do, and may decide it's not worth it. This is why I largely stopped using MS Office when the "ribbon" debuted. It seemed to me to be an arbitrary change to something that had been long familiar, and I decided "I really don't need Office anyway" and stopped using it.
elblanco 16y ago
> Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring. I agree, this seems to be a problem I notice far more intrinsic to older generations. I'm going to give another anecdote (I'm full of them today, see my other post in this subject): I once worked a very interesting job where we staffed people who traveled with an extremely sophisticated technology package into a workspace, and literally "embedded" as a super-user of the package, who acted as the user-lead for the package, and got the rest of the users up to speed by solving real world problems. There were literally dozens of components, pieces of software, data sources, etc. The data flow graph of the system covered a wall when printed out on a plotter. Between cycles acting as a super user, we'd rotate on a cycle of training new hires (about an 8 week training cycle) to do this job. Intrinsically it was a problem solving job. You'd go to a site with the package, and when the users had problems, you'd craft a solution. Over time, you'd more or less build a work book of solutions to most of the common issues that particular user team would see. From time to time we'd end up with an "older" person filling that position and going through training. I ended up on a couple of the training rotations with these folks, all great guys, but simply unable to put together a solution to very simple problems. To the person, every one of them asked us to build out a procedure manual covering all these various problem solving exercises. Let me repeat that, they wanted to field novel problem solving questions by looking them up in a procedure manual for the appropriate solution. We're talking about a system with dozens of components, each of which with an operating manual the size of a phone book, and an 8 week training course covering thousands of slides, dozens of exercises, review, scoring, scenarios, private discussion etc. If a procedure manual could have existed for every conceivable problem scenario, it would have been tens upon tens of thousands of pages. They simply couldn't fathom not having a procedure manual. And to the man, they left shortly after ending up in their field assignments because they "couldn't solve any problems and didn't have a procedure manual". Other than being a terrible waste of everybody's time, it was a repeatable pattern time and time again. Whenever we hired somebody over about 50, they always seemed to fall back in the need for procedures. And as you've said, that's a terribly brittle kind of knowledge.

by pjscott 16y ago

ams6110 16y ago

people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!" Or sometimes people see an unfamiliar UI, think "ugh---yet another drain on my time to figure this out", consider the value of what they are trying to do, and may decide it's not worth it. This is why I largely stopped using MS Office when the "ribbon" debuted. It seemed to me to be an arbitrary change to something that had been long familiar, and I decided "I really don't need Office anyway" and stopped using it.

elblanco 16y ago

> Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring. I agree, this seems to be a problem I notice far more intrinsic to older generations. I'm going to give another anecdote (I'm full of them today, see my other post in this subject): I once worked a very interesting job where we staffed people who traveled with an extremely sophisticated technology package into a workspace, and literally "embedded" as a super-user of the package, who acted as the user-lead for the package, and got the rest of the users up to speed by solving real world problems. There were literally dozens of components, pieces of software, data sources, etc. The data flow graph of the system covered a wall when printed out on a plotter. Between cycles acting as a super user, we'd rotate on a cycle of training new hires (about an 8 week training cycle) to do this job. Intrinsically it was a problem solving job. You'd go to a site with the package, and when the users had problems, you'd craft a solution. Over time, you'd more or less build a work book of solutions to most of the common issues that particular user team would see. From time to time we'd end up with an "older" person filling that position and going through training. I ended up on a couple of the training rotations with these folks, all great guys, but simply unable to put together a solution to very simple problems. To the person, every one of them asked us to build out a procedure manual covering all these various problem solving exercises. Let me repeat that, they wanted to field novel problem solving questions by looking them up in a procedure manual for the appropriate solution. We're talking about a system with dozens of components, each of which with an operating manual the size of a phone book, and an 8 week training course covering thousands of slides, dozens of exercises, review, scoring, scenarios, private discussion etc. If a procedure manual could have existed for every conceivable problem scenario, it would have been tens upon tens of thousands of pages. They simply couldn't fathom not having a procedure manual. And to the man, they left shortly after ending up in their field assignments because they "couldn't solve any problems and didn't have a procedure manual". Other than being a terrible waste of everybody's time, it was a repeatable pattern time and time again. Whenever we hired somebody over about 50, they always seemed to fall back in the need for procedures. And as you've said, that's a terribly brittle kind of knowledge.