this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
180 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
44277 readers
734 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Part of the problem is a lot of programs that people who understand tech think is simple or obvious is actually stupidly wrote and confusing and illogically set up.
Older people rely on logic. And most interfaces are the opposite of logical.
Younger people have this idea of "press a bunch of buttons and once you see how it works, then memorize the steps ".
I'm going to guess that she has said something to the effect of "why is this so complicated"?
The only issue I take is that she won't keep track of the new password that she creates. That to me is laziness.
That's the exact opposite of my experience.
I tried to explain Windows logically to the seniors in my family. This is a window. This is the taskbar, it shows your open windows. This is a folder, it contains your documents.
Every time we would start over with these abstractions which are supposed to make logical sense, the very foundation of Windows' early success with casual users. None of it ever stuck with them.
They would instead write down every minor step to achieve a specific goal in a specific way, so they could basically control Windows without paying any attention to context presented on the screen. That's the only thing that worked for them.
That’s the one thing old people just don’t do: they won’t read what’s presented on the screen.
I think it comes from growing up before GUIs, so they think of an interface as a set of buttons on a console. There was very little reason to read an interface back when they were all physical; you either knew what each button did or you didn’t and you only had to memorize it once.
Like, the controls of a T-38 tank are always the same. The controls of a ‘57 Chevy are always the same.
Once GUIs came into play, people started interacting with orders of magnitude more control interfaces, so the concept of “there is no manual; the interface is self-documenting” came into existence.
Now you’re supposed to learn the interface and use it on the first encounter, which means reading what the interface is saying.
that's roughly what I experience too. It's like if they would see a colorful pane of glass, but could not make a distinction between the "boxes" on the screen
I dont feel like government forms and taxes are any more intuitive.
on the contrary