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It really needs to stop being socially acceptable for people to stop learning through life. I’m fine with subsidizing devices for low income people, but this n

It really needs to stop being socially acceptable for people to stop learning through life. I’m fine with subsidizing devices for low income people, but this need to retain paper and pay tons extra for staff for the elderly who haven’t learned anything since they were 20 is ridiculous.

uhtred 3y ago
Maybe some people have kept learning and in doing so have learned that malicious apps and non-trustworthy companies are a thing. Maybe the ignorant people are the ones who will install an app without thinking twice just to park their car or navigate an airport.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
It's worthwhile to retain paper as a business continuity strategy in an outage or disaster scenario - e.g. just in case servers or networks are down. But websites and email are not a new technology. They've been around more than 20 years. > the presumption is that the elderly remain vigilant to every missive from the online world, when in fact many find it a jungle of scams, junk mail, endless passwords and security risks into which they venture as little as possible. It's a jungle out there for everyone.
csydas 3y ago
Strongly disagree. I very much so love being tech literate, but it's extremely annoying even if you know technology to just deal with what formerly was an on-site transaction. While it's good many business have ensured that they can work with their usual customers, sometimes it's extremely frustrating to figure out the actual way to use some services, or there are extremely inconsistent handlings of payment for services that you simply can't know until you're trying to make the transaction. It's not an unusual thought for me to imagine a summer market where some of the vendors take cash only, others only take direct transfers, and even more will only take cards. Online, it's pretty annoying as there is _so_ much spam/scam out there that the major search engines happily return that I would wager even most IT professionals would have an uneasy feeling trying to sort which one is the real site and which are just SEO spammed scams. I don't think it's about the learning curve, it's about the businesses pushing a lot of their costs onto consumers and expecting them to figure it out, and more and more it's blocking people from doing business with these businesses. I'm pretty sure there's a more healthy medium than just forcing your customers to deal with the lack of investment into the UX for their businesses. I always get a paper boarding pass along with my electronic one; it only took me one time almost missing a flight to reach this position, because the gate agent decided my electronic boarding pass was fake as they scanned it too fast across the scanner and it couldn't read it, despite me asking them to please try it again. While I was able to figure this one out, it's only because I got lucky enough that the employee working the desk finally got a break from their other duties during boarding to be able to check my situation. I'm pretty sure if there had been anything else that required this person's attention coming up, I would not have made my flight, despite having valid tickets. Don't blame the individuals here; there are instances when caveat emptor applies, but a lot of ticketing/business is definitely pushing their poor UX problems onto the consumers and just blaming them for not knowing the workflows these businesses use for their operations.
mindslight 3y ago
This stance could be somewhat tenable if there were secure smartphones that didn't betray their owners, and if the systems designed around these things weren't so janky and user-hostile (see the comment above about trying to fix some digital problem while on a bus, and having to deal with multiple accounts hassling with "login verification" and associated garbage). In other words, if these information systems could be taken for granted rather than often being a bottomless source of problems and frustration. As it stands it's completely understandable that people don't want to invest themselves into the current environment.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
The tech is here to serve me. I am not here to serve the tech. If it makes my life harder, I'm not using it. That's not because I have "stopped learning". And, frankly, I don't care if it requires the company to have more staff. (They're not "extra" staff, either - they're staff the company had before they tried to shift everything to the phone, and the company hasn't found a way to lay off yet.)

uhtred 3y ago

Maybe some people have kept learning and in doing so have learned that malicious apps and non-trustworthy companies are a thing. Maybe the ignorant people are the ones who will install an app without thinking twice just to park their car or navigate an airport.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

It's worthwhile to retain paper as a business continuity strategy in an outage or disaster scenario - e.g. just in case servers or networks are down. But websites and email are not a new technology. They've been around more than 20 years. > the presumption is that the elderly remain vigilant to every missive from the online world, when in fact many find it a jungle of scams, junk mail, endless passwords and security risks into which they venture as little as possible. It's a jungle out there for everyone.

csydas 3y ago

Strongly disagree. I very much so love being tech literate, but it's extremely annoying even if you know technology to just deal with what formerly was an on-site transaction. While it's good many business have ensured that they can work with their usual customers, sometimes it's extremely frustrating to figure out the actual way to use some services, or there are extremely inconsistent handlings of payment for services that you simply can't know until you're trying to make the transaction. It's not an unusual thought for me to imagine a summer market where some of the vendors take cash only, others only take direct transfers, and even more will only take cards. Online, it's pretty annoying as there is _so_ much spam/scam out there that the major search engines happily return that I would wager even most IT professionals would have an uneasy feeling trying to sort which one is the real site and which are just SEO spammed scams. I don't think it's about the learning curve, it's about the businesses pushing a lot of their costs onto consumers and expecting them to figure it out, and more and more it's blocking people from doing business with these businesses. I'm pretty sure there's a more healthy medium than just forcing your customers to deal with the lack of investment into the UX for their businesses. I always get a paper boarding pass along with my electronic one; it only took me one time almost missing a flight to reach this position, because the gate agent decided my electronic boarding pass was fake as they scanned it too fast across the scanner and it couldn't read it, despite me asking them to please try it again. While I was able to figure this one out, it's only because I got lucky enough that the employee working the desk finally got a break from their other duties during boarding to be able to check my situation. I'm pretty sure if there had been anything else that required this person's attention coming up, I would not have made my flight, despite having valid tickets. Don't blame the individuals here; there are instances when caveat emptor applies, but a lot of ticketing/business is definitely pushing their poor UX problems onto the consumers and just blaming them for not knowing the workflows these businesses use for their operations.

mindslight 3y ago

This stance could be somewhat tenable if there were secure smartphones that didn't betray their owners, and if the systems designed around these things weren't so janky and user-hostile (see the comment above about trying to fix some digital problem while on a bus, and having to deal with multiple accounts hassling with "login verification" and associated garbage). In other words, if these information systems could be taken for granted rather than often being a bottomless source of problems and frustration. As it stands it's completely understandable that people don't want to invest themselves into the current environment.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

The tech is here to serve me. I am not here to serve the tech. If it makes my life harder, I'm not using it. That's not because I have "stopped learning". And, frankly, I don't care if it requires the company to have more staff. (They're not "extra" staff, either - they're staff the company had before they tried to shift everything to the phone, and the company hasn't found a way to lay off yet.)