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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

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Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#261

Post by KirinDave »

mikraig wrote: post #249
KirinDave wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are those numbers not always right (they can contain replies), but also that's not the question. If the questions are about keyword presence, it's easier but it depends a lot on stuff like, "do we count attachment content?"

I have to agree with the other commenter, I think you're definitely overthinking it. A keyword search is clearly what they meant for the user to do. They're not expecting 5% of the population to train a word2vec model and produce prediction interval estimates. Just a simple back-of-the-envelope check.

Maybe they should word the question that way then? No one is asking for using widely criticized ML tooling.

The addition of the word "estimate" doesn't break the word budget and opens a lot of flexibility when it comes to unfamiliar tooling. Even if we ignore that, I reiterate: who has ever asked that question? The outlandishness of that question surely has at least as much responsibility as the obscurity of the UX in question or the general population's lack of education.

Personally I think most of the actual tasks have so little bearing on the reality of the average computer user's needs I can't say I'm surprised folks couldn't succeed. I also think this is a cognitive trap for a lot of folks here used to being skilled computer users; becoming eager to pontificate on why our unique insight is what's needed to "fix" the problem.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#262

Post by tomc1985 »

aequitas wrote: post #222
tomc1985 wrote: post #93

And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. And so on. If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic…

This is why I love macOS. Every application has the menubar at the top with everything in the right place. Apple's design guidelines also dictate that every action should be available as menu item. Preferences can always be summoned using the same keyboard shortcut, File open/save dialogs behave the same. It just works. Except for those few applications that are plainly ported from Windows or Linux without a thought…

Funny enough Office for Mac still has those classic menus with the same layout/options whereas Office for Windows took them out

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#263

Post by michaelmrose »

balfirevic wrote: post #180
michaelmrose wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is arguing with you about what YOU ought to be doing. I personally disagree with this being presented as good general advice to most people who make a lot less.

> Nobody is arguing with you about what YOU ought to be doing Current subthread started with this: "Yes, unpopular opinion these days, but car owners should really know how to do at least the bare minimum of basic car maintenance"

Car owners are a class of people that ranges from people living in said cars to the the hyper rich.

It's probable that Bezos has to give zero fucks beyond what brand he prefers. People living in their car are probably just praying it doesn't break down. In between there is a giant middle ground that composes 80% of the car owning population whose benefit derived from car know how is inversely proportional to their wealth.

Most car owners should learn the basics of how their car works and how it is maintained even if they intend to outsource that labor to others just so they aren't trivially taken advantage of. If we assume that MOST people aren't born into wealth most people could stand to learn the basics during the time when they have more time than money and then they could make productive use of this know how later.

I'm not sure how you can even argue this point.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#264

Post by mikraig »

KirinDave wrote: post #261
mikraig wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with the other commenter, I think you're definitely overthinking it. A keyword search is clearly what they meant for the user to do. They're not expecting 5% of the population to train a word2vec model and produce prediction interval estimates. Just a simple back-of-the-envelope check.

Maybe they should word the question that way then? No one is asking for using widely criticized ML tooling. The addition of the word "estimate" doesn't break the word budget and opens a lot of flexibility when it comes to unfamiliar tooling. Even if we ignore that, I reiterate: who has ever asked that question? The outlandishness of that question surely has at least as much responsibility as the obscurity of the UX i…

I just think that you're focusing on the wrong things here. Towards the top of the article they say:

> One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages. This was difficult because the problem statement was implicit and involved multiple steps and multiple constraints. It would have been much easier to solve the explicitly stated problem of booking room A for Wednesday at 3pm, but having to determine the ultimate need based on piecing together many pieces of info from across separate applications made this a difficult job for many users.

This task isn't overly complicated. It's a task that computer-savvy people do on a regular basis, but it complex enough that it might trip up someone who can't use a computer well.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#265

Post by benologist »

jodrellblank wrote: post #257
benologist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning how to use, configure and create open source is definitely one of the highest-proficiency forms of computer usage. Especially creating but even using open source requires a bevvy of advanced skills identifying appropriate software and getting it to run. The strongest 5% of computer users they found can barely search email and some % are pursuing incredibly sophisticated skills through open source setting up…

using open source requires a bevvy of advanced skills identifying appropriate software and getting it to run. Are you taking the position that open source is heroic because it has garbage user experience?

I'm taking the position that open source is how advanced computer skills are learned today, through trying to use it, configure it, host it, maintain it, write it etc.

Just look at the steps for setting up WordPress, it's a 101-level project on internet and web hosting. Reading and writing open source is a vital part of how people learn to use highly-advanced tools. I think this education is a really overlooked benefit of open source.

https://www.shivarweb.com/website-setup

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#266

Post by confidantlake »

kortilla wrote: post #66
confidantlake wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard it all the time for median. Average height, average wealth, ect.

But people usually are expecting mean in your two examples.

I think they mean the median. Median income in a group of people is usually smaller than the mean becomes of extremely wealthy outliers.

If someone says something about the "average person", they are not talking about the mean, they are talking about the median.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#267

Post by raxxorrax »

TuringTest wrote: post #244
raxxorrax wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autosave is a good feature, not only since mobile UIs. But not the way it is currently implemented that any change in the document is immediately committed to the original file if you didn't preemptively made a copy. Totally different to any version control system. For example, we have a traveling expense document that is exported as pdf after people made their input. Since quite some time people can see what the las…

Committing instantly to the file is perfectly fine, as long as you have infinite undo (preferably with version history) and local drafts - i.e. exactly what VCS provide. A shared folder in a server doesn't separate saving from sharing, but that's a fault of shared folders, not autosave. The popular storage models for end users are utterly broken, but developers don't care because they don't need to endure it, they've…

I don't really know if that is in the interest of the user. Just copying a file universally works with any file format and is a concept that users can understand.

A file has a name and a path, analogous to conventional storage systems. Putting it in a proprietary system like SharePoint or a Teams channel, to stay in the MS world, has other disadvantages.

I am giving them the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes I think the main goal for these "improvements" is vendor lock in, especially if the topic is around blurring file locations or URLs.

Access rights and relevancy of files is indeed something most alternatives organize better, but content tagging doesn't really work in my experience, because users just don't do it. So the only information about a files content remains the filename and the path.

Since those are fundamental concepts for data organization in most computer systems, it is advantageous to convey these ideas to the user and from my experience this is not that much of a hurdle.

Sure, a network share has disadvantages and without a competent clean up crew it quickly gets convoluted. But that is a problem all other systems have as well. So to improve the current situation, solutions should build upon file systems.

And asking the user if he really wants to save the file is probably just a good idea. If he ignores the message and throws away some work, he has learned a valuable lesson. Users on every knowledge level go through that experience at some point anyway. I think users suffer far more from most proprietary solutions for data exchange that is distinct from copying some files from A to B.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#268

Post by kube-system »

tomc1985 wrote: post #93

And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. And so on. If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic…

I'd agree with you if we're just talking about business users, or even home users with high-educational attainment. But this article is specifically about the broader population.

In that context, I think your assessment that 'old GUIs' were more user-friendly is very rose-tinted. Back in the early 90s when those GUIs were everywhere, personal computers came with documentation, usually still on paper, because the devices weren't even user friendly enough that a typical purchaser could power on the computer and view documentation without help. And even then, these purchasers were a tiny subset of the population, typically with high educational achievement.

This was a time when public opinion hadn't even yet tilted in the direction of considering computer literacy to be a skill useful outside of an office building. Computer skills were definitely (and even to some degree still is) something people would list on a resume.

Consider the introduction of iOS. Windows Mobile had more features, more applications, was available on cheaper phones, and was entrenched in the business market at the time. It even followed traditional Windows design patterns, and applications often had a menu bar, as to your preference. They had plenty of documentation, and a link for 'Help' was always just a click away inside the Start Menu.

So, why was iOS so successful? It wasn't because power-users like you and I switched over. Many power-users mocked the device. It wasn't successful for including user documentation, it didn't and still doesn't. iOS was successful because it could be used by people who were unable or unwilling to read and follow documentation before using such a device.

Computer literacy is certainly a good academic initiative, but it won't help you make successful software for the mass market. The vast majority of casual computer users won't pursue educational endeavors to use your application. Most will opt for an alternative that doesn't require it, or they won't use it at all.

You should always consider the intended audience for your application. In our information bubble we sometimes lose an accurate perspective of the skills of the general public. This is of little consequence for many applications, but if your application is truly intended for the general public, like a government website, it's something that might need to be highly prioritized.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#269

Post by scarface74 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #263
balfirevic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is arguing with you about what YOU ought to be doing Current subthread started with this: "Yes, unpopular opinion these days, but car owners should really know how to do at least the bare minimum of basic car maintenance"

Car owners are a class of people that ranges from people living in said cars to the the hyper rich. It's probable that Bezos has to give zero fucks beyond what brand he prefers. People living in their car are probably just praying it doesn't break down. In between there is a giant middle ground that composes 80% of the car owning population whose benefit derived from car know how is inversely proportional to their we…

It’s called an existence proof. Most people don’t know anything about car repairs, yet they manage to go through life fine letting other people repair their cars.

Re: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

#270

Post by Angostura »

agent008t wrote: post #196
Angostura wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have a play with Shortcuts on the iPhone - or Swift Playground, or any other the plethora of 3rd party coding platforms that run on iOS.

By being given an iPhone/iPad and clicking around, you wouldn't even learn about what a filesystem is, let alone about anything else in terms of how your device works. On a PC, just by being bored you can learn quite a bit about how the OS works; you can access devtools from a browser; you can learn tons and tons by trying to get some old/obscure game to work; you can google "how to make a game" which would probably…

So you haven't played with Shortcuts? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/apdb5506f698...

Or if you want Python https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pythonista-3/id1085978097

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