
Anatomy of a Noob - Why your Mom Suck at Computers - ThomPete
http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-computers/
======
patio11
One quick tip for describing things to non-technical customers: tell them
everything three times. Don't tell them to click the "sign in link". (Don't
ever use the word link. You'll regret it. "Button that says...", "picture that
says...", "underlined blue text that says...") Tell them to click the

\+ purple button

\+ which says Sign In

\+ near the top-right corner of their screen.

You will be _amazed_ how much more effective that makes them at carrying out
directions. (If you can only pick one, go for color or similar visual
distinctiveness. Your users have long-since stopped reading everything on
their computer because "none of it makes sense anyhow.")

In my experience it is worth overruling your designer's desire for visual
continuity and having your most important button(s) be uniquely identifiable
by color. (Strictly speaking I use purple for two things, but if they try to
sign in by signing up for the free trial they'll be signed in like they
intended.)

~~~
ori_b
It's even easier to walk someone through with a command line. I've done it,
reciting the magic incantations for the Windows recovery command line to a
relative who didn't even know the difference between Windows and Office.

It was painful, but I relish the idea of walking someone through a GUI to do
it even less.

~~~
Jach
How did you get the person to understand the concept of "what the command
printed out"? I don't know how many times I had to say "Yeah, but look above
the dollar sign, was there any text printed out between the current dollar
sign and the last one?" The person I was talking to always would complain "IT
DID NOTHING I'M BACK TO THE SAME THING."

I eventually got through it by getting them on IM and giving them text to
copy-paste, and sometimes they'd send me screenshots.

~~~
ori_b
"Can you read back the last three or four lines on the screen, please?"

~~~
patio11
Ori has it exactly right. Your mental model in seeing a CLI is that there are
a series of commands being executed, that each one produces output, and that
one adjusts what commands one executes in response to the output to achieve a
goal.

Your user's mental model is that they are looking at a black and white screen
written in ancient Aramaic. They can't read it, they won't try to read it, and
they cannot keep it in their working set while speaking with you or while
engaged in other tasks such as, most relevantly, typing. They hope the demon
on the phone will tell them the right magic spell, because this is _so
frustrating_.

But irrespective of their inability to read ancient Aramaic, they can still
identify color, location, and motion. So the clever demon will always phrase
his requests to read ancient Aramaic in terms of color, location, and motion.

~~~
Jach
You guys rock, thanks a lot.

------
stcredzero
When I was a TA in grad school, I had one student who _couldn't double click_.
To double click, she'd take her hand off of the mouse, hover her palm a few
inches above the mouse, then stab down twice with her finger. Doing this,
she'd move the mouse while clicking the button, so her double clicks never
registered. I kept telling her to leave her hand on the mouse and just press
twice with her finger, but to my knowledge, she never tried it.

This was the same class where I tried to use the theory of evolution as an
example, and about half the class laughed, because to them the theory was just
a ridiculous idea. Gotta love the Bible belt!

EDIT: I think there's two keys to the true intuitiveness of an interface that
many people overlook. It's easier to make an intuitive interface if you narrow
the domain of an interface. It's also easier if you narrow the effective
bandwidth of the interface -- show the user more data and they tend to be more
confused, show the user less data and they tend to be less confused. Apple
seems to apply this in Front Row and in iOS.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _When I was a TA in grad school, I had one student who couldn't double
> click._

This isn't at all uncommon actually, especially among adults age 50+. Double-
clicking a mouse requires a certain amount of manual dexterity, but we've all
forgotten that because we developed it a long time ago and to such an extent
that it's become effortless.

~~~
thangalin
Recommend they get a trackball; a big, beefy beast that can be slowed to a
crawl. Better for the neck, better for double-clicking, and easier for
positioning the cursor (especially if they have Parkinson's).

[http://cil614.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/kensington_trackba...](http://cil614.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/kensington_trackball.jpg)

------
hy3lxs
User interfaces my mother doesn't understand:

\- Running multiple applications at the same time is too confusing. She
doesn't understand/notice the taskbar. She always tries to close one thing
before starting another. Also, she doesn't notice that she has four copies of
gmail open in the same browser -- since she doesn't understand what tabs are
either.

\- Window geometry is never manipulated. She has never maximized, minimized,
or resized a window.

\- As a result of the first two problems, inter-window operations such as drag
and drop, cut and paste are often impossible.

\- She doesn't know when it's correct to left click, right click, or double
left click to do what she wants. So she opts for double-clicking on
everything: links, buttons, menus, credit card purchases...

\- She used to have 10 different "toolbars" activated in word 2003 because she
couldn't find the button she needed, and they are randomly positioned
everywhere because of accidental dragging (probably from overzealous double-
clicking). Then one day she accidentally dragged the main toolbar offscreen,
and was no longer able to open, save, or print...

\- Corollary to above -- she avoids menus, since they appear to her as a
hierarchical wall of text full of jargon. Also, they are difficult to use when
you tend to over-double-click, since they close themselves...

\- Activating Chinese UI in i18n-enabled programs it is often detrimental, as
she doesn't have the tech vocabulary in Chinese either, and it just makes it
harder for me to help her remotely.

\- She clicks on a word doc attachment in gmail, spends hours editing it, and
can never find the file again, because it's really called "C:\Documents and
Settings\Username\Temp\awq2a393.doc"

\- She will click OK on any dialog box to make it go away, because she is
trained to close dialog boxes that way. Even if the dialog box is a security
popup warning for a sketchy activeX control.

\- She calls firefox "the google" because it was installed by google pack, and
opens to the google homepage. She doesn't know the difference between the
browser and the internet.

\- She doesn't understand why she can't print a web page and have it look
nice, without all the extra columns of ad junk.

\+ Okay, one thing that does work well for her -- hitting control key twice
accesses google desktop search popup to find anything -- even those annoying
files in TEMP. She can remember that shortcut.

Once ipad gets traditional chinese support -- I'm going to get her one, and
cut my tech support calls by 90%...

~~~
snprbob86
\- Email can have multiple recipients and reply vs reply-to-all

My mother has been using Outlook at her office for over 5 years. When I send
an email to both her and my father, she replies only to me and frequently ends
with "tell your father..."

-Copy and paste

Somehow, she understands CUT and paste, but can't make the mental leap to
COPY. She typically cuts, pastes it right back to where she came from, and
then goes to paste it again elsewhere.

\--

Despite all this, she _used to_ work with a 100% text mode CLI app for
requisitioning with airline tickets as a travel agent. She was an expert at
esoteric commands and had a little notebook that co-workers had photocopied
and bound as a reference manual. She didn't understand a thing that she was
typing, but she knew which magic incantations worked and which didn't. I
noticed that she was doing the equivalent of calling functions, piping data,
storing variables, etc., but to her it was "I type this in, and instead of
'CITY' I write the actual city name. Oh, but if the city name has a space in
it, I need to type \ before the space. But if I type a \ anywhere else, it can
crash the whole computer."

~~~
nandemo
Clearly you should set up a mail filter that forwards emails with "From: Mom"
and mail body containing "tell your father".

~~~
pufuwozu
I don't think that's a great idea. A mum/mom could always send an email saying
"DON'T tell your father!"

------
kscaldef
My mother has been a practicing computer scientist for 40 years and doesn't
particularly appreciate your stereotypes.

~~~
freakwit
But isn't it interesting that she gets her child to make a comment on HN
instead of writing it herself?

~~~
alnayyir
I don't usually say things like this, but...

`hahahaha, buuuuuurn`

That said, we're the kids of the world by most standards (median age).

You think Thompson or Pike chill on here?

------
cypherdog
I don't think this applies to my Mom. She is 50 years old and has installed
harddrives (both scsi & ide), memory, formated and installed Windows 98,XP,ME
(blah) and 7. Set up her own wireless. She calls me every-now-and-then for
tech support, though honestly, the level of questions she asks have shot ahead
of me, since I've been on a Mac since 05' and hate messing with hardware now.
You'd be surprised how much a game like the Sim's can motivate a person to
pick this stuff up.

~~~
trafficlight
She is definitely an outlier.

------
kiba
Well, some people like to say that there is nothing "intuitive" about User
Interface whatsoever, even for Mac systems.

I don't know if it is true, but it does seem to have some air of truth around
it.

~~~
neonscribe
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.
<http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/08/nipple.html>

~~~
kenjackson
Although even the nipple is often something that has to be learned. There are
a lot of lactation specialists that help new mothers and babies latch and
feed. And a surprising number of babies that have trouble finding the nipple.

~~~
lotharbot
This is especially common with slightly premature babies. My son was born a
day shy of 36 weeks (normal is 40 weeks; 38 is considered "full term") and
needed a lot of training.

He knew how to suck and he knew how to swallow, but couldn't put them
together.

------
LiveTheDream
I learned long ago to never do family tech support over the phone. Use
screensharing -- TeamViewer FTW. Even the most non-technical person can open
up a teamviewer session and you can take it from there.

~~~
danudey
Despite my parents asking me what kind of computer they should get, and me
telling them they should get a Mac, they keep getting Windows machines. They
don't call me for tech support that often (they're pretty clever folk), but
usually when they do I'm out hiking or at the mall or something, so I offer a
few suggestions, then honestly say 'Well I dunno, I don't use Windows so I've
never encountered that.'

The only real problems they've called with recently though are 'suddenly I
can't get on the internet' problems, which is usually solved by saying "look
in the Add/Remove Programs control panel for anything that says 'Norton' or
'Symantec', then uninstall it and reboot"

TL;DR: After a few weeks/months/years of Mac use, you can disclaim all
knowledge of Windows to family members. Symantec sucks.

------
kenjackson
Didn't his mom notice that the cursor moved the opposite direction? That's the
first thing my mom would've said: "This mouse is broken".

~~~
ThomPete
No she didn't unfortunately. Mind you the mouse is an abstraction, which means
it can be interpreted in many ways. Inverted mouse used to be natural in fps
games and still is in flight simulators.

A touch screen on the other hand that don't register where you click but just
randomly chose coordinates now that would be noticed.

~~~
arghnoname
One of my aunts got my grandmother a computer 10 years ago or so. She had
actually operated old IBM machines for accounting back many moons ago, but
hadn't used a computer otherwise.

When I went to her house I got on her computer and said, "where's the mouse?"
She didn't know what I was talking about, of course. She sewed a lot, so when
I discovered that she thought it was some kind of foot pedal, I guess that
makes sense.

These things are always illuminating. "Scroll up" gets a confused expression.
She initially just tried moving the mouse. Click the scrollbar. What's that?
How do you click? The button on the mouse? Which one? Do I click and release
or hold the click? etc...

It's amazing how many minor details we can't help but take for granted.

------
listic
So, why does my Mom actually suck at computers? Is it because computer
interface designers suck at design?

------
JoachimSchipper
I like 'Bablefish'.

------
tkahn6
It would help me a lot if you defined what _you_ mean by 'holistic' since you
use it frequently in your article. I'm not familiar with this term used in
other contexts besides medicine. <http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/holistic> isn't very helpful and the term remains
rather opaque.

~~~
ThomPete
Hmm thought that expression was well known also outside medicine?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism>

~~~
tkahn6
I guess that would make me ignorant in that respect. The first paragraph of
the wiki article clears it up for me. Thanks.

