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Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

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Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#211

Post by drspacemonkey »

koliber wrote: post #115

Regarding the "is it plugged in?" question. A great anecdote I heard was that the support person on the phone asked if the power plug was clean. The user was confused. The support person told them to unplug it, blow the dust out of the holes, and plug it back in. This fixed the problem! The issue was that the power plug was in the socket, but too loose to connect. Somehow, the support person figured this was the case…

When I worked tech support for a small regional cable ISP, I'd always tell people they had to "ground out any built-up static" on their cable line. This process involved unplugging the modem, unscrewing the coax connector, tapping the middle pin with a pen or pencil, and plugging it all back in.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#212

Post by keithpeter »

reitanqild wrote: post #208
keithpeter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-un... Canonical actually spent money on user interface testing. I can find some activity for Gnome shell but I'm having problems digging up any solid testing for KDE.

Usability people once came up with a brilliant observation about "spatial" and someone used that to argue that everytime you clicked on a folder in Gnome it should open in a new window. Of course this made desktop a mess. Many usability people also claim that it is good to have the menus attached to the top of the screen instead of attached to the window it affects. Software recommended by usability people often have…

Remember that you are in the top decile of computer users if not in the 99th percentile.

Unity (Canonical's fork of Gnome Shell) perpetrates neither the 'spatial' filer nor the hamburger thing. Gnome Shell's Nautilus no longer uses 'spatial' presentation either - I recollect that Acorn RISC-OS used that metaphor.

I think that menus at top of screen made perfect sense in the days of screens with resolutions of 512 x 342 - I used a Mac LC - and on netbooks which is where Unity came from after all. On a large monitor they make a lot less sense I agree - huge trek to the top of the screen to click on stuff and the danger of a misplaced click on the way changing the menus.

I stopped using Unity for ages because of the way it broke the 'ALT-F' style mnemonics (Alt-IOF to insert a typeset equation in LibreOffice &c) but things have improved recently.

I find myself in the strange position of actually rather liking Gnome shell from Debian Wheezy onward (3.8)

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#213

Post by sctb »

appelza wrote: post #80

Trust silly shit like this to make the top of HN. Omg, what tech did u use to create this, on your macbook???

Please comment civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. We ban accounts that continue like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#214

Post by Karlozkiller »

majewsky wrote: post #108
Karlozkiller wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not so simple. I have no experienced with HBO Now but similar services. And typically they use DRM like Microsoft Silverlight or the like to prevent people from playing videos without proper access. The reason why such things are harder to get to work in Linux sometimes is because such DRM-solutions are not always baked in or provided by the same providers as in windows, and might be proprietary. Also co…

Of course that's correct, but we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place. All they will perceive is "I cannot watch this video because Linux".

Then make them install a distribution preconfigured with these things. I'm quite sure distros like that are around, they were last time I checked for them like 5-10 years ago anyways.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#215

Post by brokenmachine »

hectormalot wrote: post #184
MaulingMonkey wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even about them failing to learn, necessarily - it's them failing to internalize deeply enough to recall how to solve their problems the next time they crop up. They're being handed answers from up high instead of experimenting - no practice, no wonder they can't solve it the next time either. Even techies can run into this problem - the only reason we might do better, on average, is that we experiment with…

Lack of experimentation might also be because they are afraid to break something. I remember my (completely non digital) parents being unusually good with their car navigation system. Turns out the sales rep had told them: "its impossible to break this system, just try and it will be ok", and so they had trial and errorred their way to understanding how it worked.

100%. All too often with our software it is too easy to break stuff in an unfixable (to a newbie) way.

Just an anecdote: I organised an Android phone for my gf's mother. After a lot of training, she was using it to send and receive photos to her family and loving having it.

If she took a photo and wasn't happy with it, she would want to delete it. In the Samsung gallery app (Galaxy S4), you long-press on the thumbnail of the photo, then choose delete.

Problem is, the thumbnail of the Album itself is actually the last photo that you've taken. So she has inadvertently deleted the whole album (all her photos) by accident twice now!

I can't blame her because the icon she is deleting looks exactly the same as the picture she's trying to delete, only the message is a tiny bit different ("would you like to delete this album?" versus the usual "would you like to delete this photo?"), easy to not read the last word of the message if you've seen it 1000x before and done it safely.

I blame Samsung 100% for these accidential deletions. These phones and software just aren't designed with the non-confident user in mind, and in my opinion that's a broken UI.

Deleting an album containing hundreds of photos is something so dangerous and something you'd probably want to do so rarely that such an operation should at least warrant an extra message saying, "you are about to delete an album containing $number photos, are you sure?" And why not have a recycle bin? There are many ways this could have been easily avoided.

I can totally understand why a user like that would be nervous about pressing buttons they're not sure about. Especially after accidentally deleting all their photos!

Also there's no way to use a better Gallery app, the camera app always uses the IMO broken Samsung Galley app to review photos, and there's no way to change that.

Unfortunately I can't tell her "it's impossible to break this system" with that phone. I wish I could.

Sometimes I think that I'm just lucky I didn't have an experience like that when I was first starting with computers, because I might have been so scared after that that I wouldn't have continued to explore and learn. Nowadays I basically think that there's no problem with computers that you can't fix given the time and motivation.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#216

Post by brokenmachine »

adav wrote: post #153
beefsack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An iPad is an expensive solution if they've already got a PC, and Linux is a great free way to resurrect computers that the commercial operating systems have left behind.

That depends on how much you value your own personal time setting their system up and maintaining it. An iPad might have a greater up front cost, but the time savings could make it a comparative bargain over the lifetime of the device.

iPads are not maintenance and support free.

I would personally rather support a linux machine that I can remotely connect to, give them icons on the desktop, etc, than an iPad.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#217

Post by brokenmachine »

ekianjo wrote: post #89
harryf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise moved my Mum to Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it dramatically improved our relationship. Hasn't all been easy e.g. photo management has been a moving target but largely it's "just worked" during that time.

Same here for photo management - there is still no perfect solution so far. What did you end up using ? I am using a combination of Rapid Photo Downloader + Shotwell - not great, but it kind of works.

Is picasa for Linux still usable?

Picasa is/was great.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#218

Post by MaulingMonkey »

brokenmachine wrote: post #215
hectormalot wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of experimentation might also be because they are afraid to break something. I remember my (completely non digital) parents being unusually good with their car navigation system. Turns out the sales rep had told them: "its impossible to break this system, just try and it will be ok", and so they had trial and errorred their way to understanding how it worked.

100%. All too often with our software it is too easy to break stuff in an unfixable (to a newbie) way. Just an anecdote: I organised an Android phone for my gf's mother. After a lot of training, she was using it to send and receive photos to her family and loving having it. If she took a photo and wasn't happy with it, she would want to delete it. In the Samsung gallery app (Galaxy S4), you long-press on the thumbnai…

Agreed on all points.

> Sometimes I think that I'm just lucky I didn't have an experience like that when I was first starting with computers,

Oh dear - tell me you've learned to make backups anyways! ;)

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#219

Post by brokenmachine »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #218
brokenmachine wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. All too often with our software it is too easy to break stuff in an unfixable (to a newbie) way. Just an anecdote: I organised an Android phone for my gf's mother. After a lot of training, she was using it to send and receive photos to her family and loving having it. If she took a photo and wasn't happy with it, she would want to delete it. In the Samsung gallery app (Galaxy S4), you long-press on the thumbnai…

Agreed on all points. > Sometimes I think that I'm just lucky I didn't have an experience like that when I was first starting with computers, Oh dear - tell me you've learned to make backups anyways! ;)

No, still haven't learned that lesson properly.

I have become very good at data recovery though. Never lost anything I couldn't later recover!

But yeah, don't do that people!

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#220

Post by Zelmor »

Ziomislaw wrote: post #156
Zelmor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should start with the basic concepts next time you are around. Explain things like computer, internet, operating system, programs. Just in a Feynman style of explanation, very brief and easy to understand. Once my mother called that the tablet said it had a virus and should scan immediately. I asked what she saw on the screen, what she was doing when it occurred. It was an aggressive pop-up in an app she wa…

If only it was that easy. Most of the ppl having simmilar problems will only pretend to listen and remember your explanations, only to run to you with the exact same problem in a couple of hours.

I am in the habit of telling them once, and I put it forward during the 'lecture'. If you are too lazy to listen, I am not wasting my time. Go pay someone to help you. I am not your support desk.
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