21–30 of 53 posts
In the glory days of AOL I ran into non-tech savvy users who thought that it was the internet. I was met with blank stares when I opened another IE instance. In many cases, companies that develop software for non-tech-savvy users go the extra mile to make things easy to use. For me, it's been easy to believe that it was somewhat predatory to make your "thing" a complete portal, but I can see now that it is really a c…
I often feel bad for small business users. If they’re living in Microsoft’s world and without volume licensing they are forced into whatever new flavors of Office and Windows are in the pipe when they get a new computer. You try explaining that no Office 2013 isn’t really all that much better for basic functionality than Office 2003. Or anything about Windows 8.
Working in Windows IT with small businesses you run into a lot of non-savvy users. We tolerate a lot of simple issues, I mean simple issues are our bread and butter sometimes, but it can be a little ridiculous. I expect the average office user to know a few things. To remember their username. To be able to choose a different printer than the default. My opinion is that their job, their paycheck, depends on their work…
Here's the kicker: most of these non-tech-savvy users are not the older generation. They are the younger generation. The generation that is used to tech that "just works", without ever having to figure out why it doesn't.
As a teacher of Computing, I couldn't agree more. I've blogged about it here http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... Habits I see daily include: typing domain names into search bars, using Caps Lock to type a single uppercase letter, holding down off buttons to 'shutdown' a computer, using passwords like asdfg1234.
What possible motivation would they have to learn more? Okay, they might use a computer in their job - but inefficiency there is often their employer's problem, and considering you can't run arbitrary code on most companies systems (their IT policy generally excludes this) they benefit nothing from learning a programming language.
What does that leave them with? A games machine perhaps, a glorified typewriter with some telecoms capabilities to all intents and purposes.
The concept of computers as a general tool simply does not exist to many people. Consequently it's little wonder that they know next to nothing about them.
Having done loads of tech support for old people, I've really got used to being sensitive about the terminology I used - and their 'alternative' terms. Some of the best examples: - 'the green' for the desktop (that teal desktop background from Win98) - 'e' for the internet ("So when I'm on e...") - 'the computer' for the screen - particularly hard to diagnose over the phone Also, several times I fell foul to the old…
> I got her to show me how she used the computer; she got into Facebook by typing Facebook into Bing and clicking on the search result. This is so common to non tech-savvy people (I observed this dozens of time) that it makes you wonder why browsers adopted single bar for searching AND entering the URLs so late. This, when implemented properly, solves the problem, because usually you only need to type just few letter…
Why do we need to remember these people? Car manufacturers don't have to say "wait, what if they don't know what a door handle is."