The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by viklove » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

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…

Then you want to disable mouse acceleration, and you're humped. Apple's approach to simplicity is just to extinguish user choice. That's not a great approach.

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

#242

Post by jodrellblank » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

rjf72 wrote: post #98

userbinator wrote: post #28

Interesting to see that Japan both has the most "can't use computers" and "strong" users... I've personally observed (and had to help) many times where an otherwise extremely intelligent person seems to completely lose his/her brain upon being seated in front of a computer, and wonder why that is; these people can be experts in various other fields involving significant mental ability (e.g. maths, physics, chemistry)…

Peruse the posts in this thread and I think you can see your answer. Many people seem to be literally happy to accept ignorance in fields outside their expertise. There's one exchange near the top of this thread that's been repeated multiple times with the specifics swapped. A user suggested that people would benefit from learning the basics of car maintenance - changing fluids, brake pads, etc.. It's downvoted with…

Brake pads? A garage can lift my car up, take all four wheels off with a pneumatic driver, and be mostly done in a few minutes; for me, that's a hand-jack lift of each corner of the car one at a time, with a hand and foot lug wrench to remove and re-fit 20 wheel nuts, then a trip to dispose of the brake pads, and several hours.

Framing it as "ignorance" and "voluntarily incompetent" is incorrect, I don't reject the knowledge of brake pad changing, I desire to avoid the work of brake pad changing. It doesn't need doing often, I don't have the tools and experience to do a good, quick, job (pneumatic wheel nut removers, or a car lift). I already have to get my car inspected annually (UK), and that's a perfect time for a garage to change things. Worse, if I screw something up by being inexperienced, I'm in trouble - I can't drive my car to a garage, and a tow would cost more than the work. Assuming I can afford it and am not on a tight budget, then were's the compelling reason to do it?

> improve their independence

An illusion. I can't legally run a car without a garage doing an annual inspection, I can't make my own brake pads. I don't become more independent by removing and replacing 20 wheel nuts.

> [improve their] knowledge

Brake pads need changing every ~24,000 miles, that's every 2 years of average mileage, or ~25 times you will use this knowledge in your adult motoring life. Rough numbers. (Electric cars with regenerative braking will reduce wear on brake discs and pads). Is that a priority thing to learn? The best available thing to learn?

But my point is not that it's a bad trade, my point is that framing it as "the only imaginable reason is wilful ignorance" is little more than a putdown, and it's wrong. There are other reasons. You're selling the Heinlein-ian "if you can't do Everything yourself, then you're not a Real Man(tm)" worldview with a slightly different wrapper on it.

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

#243

Post by Noos » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #182

nitwit005 wrote: post #90

I'd be cautious of this sort of study. Just as many of us Google how to do things, people can offen figure out enough to get things done with the help of those around them. The staff at fast food restaurants and call centers generally seem to muddle through. Similarly, kids seem to figure out video game problems that would stump many adults.

Video games disprove a lot of UI/UX "wisdom" by demonstrating that people actually do learn - if they care. It's often the context that makes people not care. Do they get any personal value from caring? Can they get away with not caring and still get the same (or same enough) results? For video games, the answers are, in order, "yes" and "no", and so players easily learn to operate absurdly complex interfaces, and to…

No, all you need to disprove this is to look at the achievement rates for beating a game. When barely 1/4 of people finish the game, which ideally is what a developer wants, the idea that players muddle through is a bit much.

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

#244

Post by TuringTest » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #225

TuringTest wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autosave is a safe and recommended UI practice; it has been widely implemented and validated by mobile UIs, where whatever you're doing is recorded when you close the app without having to explicitly save the document (a half written Whatsapp message, a mail draft...) > Just image everyone in your company saves any document they opened automatically. How would these even look like after 1-2 weeks? The essence of usin…

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 got their superior tools that they keep to themselves.

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

#245

Post by EliRivers » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

_the_inflator wrote: post #134

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…

> 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. Mistake #1: Windows != GUI Apple has/had another design language. But Apple got it more right. Ironically Steve Jobs fulfilled Bill Gates mission (~a computer in household) with the iPhone. Mistake #2…

Mistake #1: Windows != GUI

I think that's only true in a literal sense. For many people, it's untrue in a practical sense, and those people live in a practical world.

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

#246

Post by bitwize » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #208

userbinator wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer versions of MS Office (with that ribbon) have the same problem. There is an About dialog, but getting to it is a process that I still can't remember after having to do it a few times. Yet Help->About is still in my mind after all these years, despite not using it all that much. The idiotic full screen save menu that forces you to click a few more times to save on the computer instead of a cloud service (I'm sur…

You should be glad that you still have any save menu, as they wanted to scrap that in favor of autosave. Everything coming out of MS the last 5 years has been thoroughly underwhelming, but the UI development and user infantilization takes the cake. Just image everyone in your company saves any document they opened automatically. How would these even look like after 1-2 weeks? The decision processes at Microsoft canno…

No. Autosave is the correct approach.

We computer people invented the concept of saving as an abstraction over the fact that unless what is in RAM gets written to disk, it is at risk of being lost once the computer is turned off or the program closes. The end user should never, ever have to worry about what is in RAM or on disk. The end user should expect computer documents to behave the way physical documents behave. Physical documents, and the changes people make to them, persist even after you stop working with them. We should go one better than the real world and autosave not just the document, but a complete undo history for that document.

It's not infantilizing to make your program conform to the expectations of real-world logic. It's bewildering to the user when your program does not.

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

#247

Post by bitwize » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

agent008t wrote: post #150

_the_inflator wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Mistake #1: Windows != GUI Apple has/had another design language. But Apple got it more right. Ironically Steve Jobs fulfilled Bill Gates mission (~a computer in household) with the iPhone. Mistake #2…

A Linux/Windows computer in a household is a device that allows both consuming and creating. Many, if not most of us got into creating using a computer just by having access to one and being curious. An iPhone or an iPad is just a device for consumption. It completely hides, if not locks you out of, the underlying workings of the device, meaning that you learn nothing and you create nothing.

iPhones and iPads have plenty of creation tools available. What you say is more true of Android, which is fundamentally an advertisement delivery platform.

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

#248

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

Noos wrote: post #243

TeMPOraL wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games disprove a lot of UI/UX "wisdom" by demonstrating that people actually do learn - if they care. It's often the context that makes people not care. Do they get any personal value from caring? Can they get away with not caring and still get the same (or same enough) results? For video games, the answers are, in order, "yes" and "no", and so players easily learn to operate absurdly complex interfaces, and to…

No, all you need to disprove this is to look at the achievement rates for beating a game. When barely 1/4 of people finish the game, which ideally is what a developer wants, the idea that players muddle through is a bit much.

I think I've finished like 5% of the games I played with. Even counting ones on which I spent more than 10 hours, I don't think it would be more than 10%. Hell, I'm 241 hours into Stellaris and haven't even won one game yet; my Kerbal Space Program hour count is four digit and you can't even win that game :).

Point being, people don't finish games because they get their fill of enjoyment before then. Many games I know start to feel like a chore after a time; some early on, others near the end. Unless there's a story you desperately want to see resolved - and many games these days ship without one - there's little reason to play a game once you mastered all the different mechanics it offered and seen most of the variety it featured. And then there's multiplayer, which wouldn't even count under this metric.

I propose a different one: people who play a game with nontrivial UI for more than 2 hours are evidence in favor. If the UI was a problem, they'd drop out sooner. After all, unlike software used at work, nobody forces you to play a game.

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

#249

Post by mikraig » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #235

kaibee wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work with computers for a living and off the top of my head I'd say, "This is incredibly annoying to do using normal tools at my disposal." I think you're overthinking this. They aren't looking for a NN based solution with sentiment analysis. from:John Smith sustainability -> results: 300 from:John Smith -> results: 800 37.5%

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.

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

#250

Post by RugnirViking » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #40

mooreds wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of "Profession", a great short story by Isaac Asimov: https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

That site has horrible design, that hurts my eyes so much. I've resorted to just copy/paste the text there to my preferred editor to read it. That said, I did enjoyed the story, so thank you.

While that is true, I think it (the site) gets something of a pass for being almost 20 years old.