3 ms·

My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functio

by Kranar 4y ago

My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...

bojan 4y ago
Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
- int_19h 4y ago
  There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus. But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread. Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
How is condensing with menus worse than undiscoverable gestures and button rituals? IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.
Aeolun 4y ago
> seem to be able to pick up quite easily I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.
rayiner 4y ago
So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneNote or Outlook web apps is less than the Office 98 versions. Google Docs compares poorly feature-wise to WordPerfect versions from the 1990s. It’s quite remarkable how bad this software is compared to how big development teams are now. I don’t know if any other industry that’s ever regressed in this way.
- majormajor 4y ago
  This is extremely uncharitable. So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc? And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both? > Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc? I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59. > And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing." To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc... Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them. And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.
majormajor 4y ago
It's definitely a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around - here we're nostalgic for rows and rows of menus and buttons; but Microsoft famously tried to "fix" the menu-and-toolbar "bloat" with the Ribbon, after all, since tons of people had NO IDEA how to deal with all those menus and buttons. "Go through every menu and click every button" was never super discoverable if you're in a hurry. And hell, there are still people who will tell you you're doing it wrong if you're using the UI instead of using Vim/Emacs and a million keyboard shortcuts and plugins... ;) I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).

by Kranar 4y ago

bojan 4y ago

Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.

agumonkey 4y ago
Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
Baeocystin 4y ago
FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
int_19h 4y ago
There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus. But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread. Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

How is condensing with menus worse than undiscoverable gestures and button rituals? IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.

Aeolun 4y ago

> seem to be able to pick up quite easily I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.

rayiner 4y ago

So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneNote or Outlook web apps is less than the Office 98 versions. Google Docs compares poorly feature-wise to WordPerfect versions from the 1990s. It’s quite remarkable how bad this software is compared to how big development teams are now. I don’t know if any other industry that’s ever regressed in this way.

majormajor 4y ago
This is extremely uncharitable. So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc? And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both? > Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc? I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59. > And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing." To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc... Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them. And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.

majormajor 4y ago

It's definitely a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around - here we're nostalgic for rows and rows of menus and buttons; but Microsoft famously tried to "fix" the menu-and-toolbar "bloat" with the Ribbon, after all, since tons of people had NO IDEA how to deal with all those menus and buttons. "Go through every menu and click every button" was never super discoverable if you're in a hurry. And hell, there are still people who will tell you you're doing it wrong if you're using the UI instead of using Vim/Emacs and a million keyboard shortcuts and plugins... ;) I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).