
“What’s a Browser?” – Remembering the Non-Tech-Savvy User - philk10
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2013/08/09/inexperienced-users/
======
bowlofpetunias
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.

~~~
MarcScott
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...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)
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.

~~~
gcb0
The whole issue with the industry (specially here) is that the drive to just
make it work completely obliviates the user. Maybe we should strive to better
inform while making it just work.

~~~
pestaa
In my opinion there's no fix for lack of curiosity.

~~~
tjoff
Well, the "smart"phones of today hardly inspire curiosity...

~~~
yareally
I've seen plenty of non-tech savvy users become curious on how to mod their
Android device. Most don't go very far past "1 click root," but there's always
a small number that have dreams of learning to compile Android or even
learning how to do some coding.

Heck, I've even had a few people in their 40s and 50s quietly messaage me on
Android forums asking for how they can learn more about development and
recommendations for learning the basics for programming. Most of that is just
from someone that one day decided to root their device and then it opened up a
"can of worms" that lead down a path of curiosity. I'd say if a person has the
spark of curiosity to learn, they will do it regardless of device. It matters
more though on if they're encouraged and are shown that even they can learn
what many people think of as "magic" (even though we all know it isn't :) ).

------
M4v3R
> 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 letters from site name
and hit Enter to go there.

~~~
cosmie
The problem is you have to know that behavior exists. Many of the users that
"search to site" will _still_ type Google into the omnibox, and complete the
process as they always have (by searching Google for Facebook and clicking the
link).

------
michaelfeathers
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 consequence of trying to approach users at their
level. What irks me is when it seems like a conscious lock-in strategy.

~~~
83457
To be fair, initially it was a portal to itself. As in AOL did not original
provide internet access, heck it was pre-www days. When they added it making
it part of the existing portal interface was logical for various reasons
including reducing customer service. But yeah, they also wanted people to use
their content over internet sources.

~~~
michaelfeathers
Thanks. I forgot all about that. What it became makes a lot of sense in that
light.

------
jmuguy
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 on the PC. And they’ve been using it for
decades in some cases, you’d think something would get through. For some
though I think its just too abstract, they don’t have a good mind for thinking
about the computer. And that’s ok.

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.

~~~
Ziomislaw
heh, reminds me of office ladies using calculator to _type_ a proper sum of a
column into XLS (using computer for 10+ years doing THE SAME THING)

~~~
pestaa
I've heard worse. One such office worker is tasked to duplicate an Excel file.
She does so by printing the original one, manually drawing the grids with pen
and ruler, labeling the columns, and then typing it all in cell by cell.

She works by the hour and earns massive amount of cash.

------
ucarion
I imagine most fields have a lot of jargon too; it's just that technology is
one of the few areas that has become essentially ubiquitous, so we notice the
difference between technology-savvy and non-technology-savvy more often.

I imagine that in the eyes of tax experts, we are all totally ignorant of how
we could make the most out of the tax system.

~~~
wutbrodo
In my opinion, that's exactly the problem. I don't understand how people don't
do the math in their head that spending half an hour learning* to be more
efficient at something that you use for hours and hours every day is worth it.
I couldn't get my oft-texting mom to switch to T9 (back in the era of
dumbphones) because she didn't want to "waste her time" (though she was fine
constantly pecking out texts more than twice as slowly as she could have
been). I finally convinced my mom once she saw that it only took my _grandma_
a day to pick it up.

*Even just by asking a friend. In my experience, tech-savvy friends (including myself) are extremely willing to explain how things work, since it's a welcome respite from "just fix it"

------
skellystudios
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 bash.org facepalmer of physical
action when I ask if they can "open a window". Skeomorphism can be confusing.

~~~
sp332
It's not like these things have labels on them. (Well Win8 finally has a
button that says "Desktop".) "Window" and "cursor" and "icon" etc is really
just jargon.

------
6d0debc071
Many people _don 't_ struggle to understand how to use computers. They don't
understand them particularly well, but they don't struggle to understand them
either. They rise to a level with the problems that they want to use the
system to address and then... their understanding is adequate until something
goes wrong.

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.

------
doubledub
I've always assumed younger users were sharper at correcting problems and
knowing most of these terms since electronics were available at younger ages.
Seems like more opportunities to accidentally discover fixes/areas/tools/etc.

Our recently created business targets relatively older users, so we had to
make adjustment for knowledge levels similar to what this article mentions.

Favorite quote from article, "This fix was easy: switch to Chrome (remove 5
different search toolbars!) and voila, baby and cat photos and Bubble Safari
all working as intended."

Thanks Mark Zuckerberg!

------
pauletienney
Some of my friends (no maxi geek but 30 yo, gamers, smartphone users ...)
still type google.com in chrome bar in order to type Facebook in google and
then access FB via search results ... Mindfuck

~~~
ryanmcbride
I'll bet they also don't use the scroll wheel.

------
kaoD
Related:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ)
Asking passersby in Times Square what is a browser.

~~~
ahoy
What's most interesting about this, I think, is people's unwillingness to
admit they don't know something. No one wants to look stupid, or ignorant, or
uneducated, even in front of complete strangers. I'm certainly guilty of this,
I suspect most of us are.

~~~
wutbrodo
Hell if anything (at least for me), doing it in front of complete strangers
makes it way worse. I freely admit ignorance to people I know even slightly
well; they already know I'm a certain level of intelligence, so I don't worry
as much about one contradictory data pt. By contrast, in front of strangers,
the only thing they'll know about me is my ignorance in that situation.

------
codva
Back in 1996 I had a side gig teaching Internet 101 to people who generally
had just bought their first computer at WalMart and were afraid to open the
box. Every class the first mention of "mouse" caused a few hands to go up and
ask what a mouse was. Most of them had the mouse in their other hand at the
time. We used Yahoo for search, and Alta Vista for the 'Advanced Search
Strategies" class.

------
GeneralMayhem
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."

~~~
recursive
A door handle is much simpler concept. Car manufacturers do have to say "wait,
what if they don't know what a transmission is?"

~~~
wutbrodo
I don't know about that. It seems like the complexity of operating a car (at
least in terms of "# of things you need to know about") is pretty similar to
that of a computer (at least on Linux/Mac systems; Windows is needlessly
complicated for the non-tech-savvy user imo).

In a car the things you HAVE to understand are the shifter, (P/D/N), the
interplay between gas/brake/coasting (which is more complex than it sounds;
just ask any new driver), the array of necessary controls for auxiliary
devices (headlights, windshield wipers, side-view mirror controls, etc). EDIT:
forgot the emergency brake, and all the rules/mechanics of the road (stop
signs, parking on a hill, left turns, right turns, etc etc etc etc)

For a computer, for most people's day-to-day usage, the only things you really
need to understand are: logging in to the computer, the browser, Google, and
the URL bar (technically optional, as many people use Google directly for
everything). I understand that, complexity-wise, each of these don't match up
one-to-one with the car example, but the fact remains that with very little
effort, and almost no "under-the-hood" understanding, you can become what
passes for "savvy" these days.

Anecdotally, my dad has always been extremely non-tech-savvy; He had _years_
of being set in his cargo cult usage of his computer (in which he didn't
really distinguish between having a browser open and being on his att yahoo
homepage, having a window minimized and having it closed, logging into yahoo
and logging into the computer, etc). I was able to explain to him the 3 or 4
pieces that fit together using a simple example (e.g. "websites are places you
go, the browser is the vehicle that gets you there", etc). He still doesn't
necessarily understand anything even marginally under-the-hood; But he
understands the operation of a computer (for his purposes) pretty solidly, and
no longer has the issue of being helpless when the situation he encounters
deviates slightly from what he's used to (i.e. opening the browser and not
being logged in to yahoo, for whatever reason).

~~~
recursive
I think you're glossing over things. How to use a mouse. The difference
between moving your mouse cursor and focusing a text field. How to double
click. (most new mouse users have trouble with this) How to turn the machine
on and off. Clipboard. I don't have much experience with non-Windows OSes, so
I won't comment on that. But everything inside a computer is necessarily more
abstract than a door handle, since it doesn't physically exist. IMO that makes
it harder to understand necessarily.

------
ryanmcbride
Every conversation I have with someone who's having browser troubles:

"What browser do you use?" "I don't use a browser, I use the internet"

I then know exactly what the problem is.

------
Shalle
This is interesting, many of the people I talk with believes that the browser
is "internet". Which makes me giggle a bit inside everytime.

------
shmerl
It reminds me:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ)

------
pauletienney
Remembering ? Those people are the huge majority.

~~~
jgranby
'Remembering' as in 'bearing in mind' rather than 'looking back nostalgically'
(i.e. as in 'remember to look both ways before you cross the road'). My first
instinct on seeing the title was the same as yours.

