So between watching my parents/grandparents struggle with “new” technology related stuff (computers, tablets, apps, DVR interfaces, etc…), and reading the threads about all the apparent consternation and frustration with the SDMB’s move to Discourse, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s some sort of age-related cognitive decline that happens somewhere in your fifties or sixties that renders you unable to adapt to changes like that.
Is this a thing? I mean, I’m 47, and while I might find some technological changes to be annoying from a design or usability standpoint, I can’t say that I’ve ever had a hard time figuring out how to use an application or interface, especially if it’s one that does the same thing as whatever it is that it replaced. I mean, Discourse was different, but just not hard to figure out, and after the first bug fix/usability fix release of the SDMB, was actually more pleasant to me than vBulletin.
But when I read the threads, these changes seem to have been a major source of consternation- like they literally couldn’t figure out how to do stuff in Discourse. Which is also baffling- Discourse is much more similar to modern apps than vBulletin ever was, and everyone ought to know how that iconography/design works by now in the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. And it’s not like lots of other message boards don’t also use something more similar to Discourse, if they don’t use Discourse.
Is this just people griping for the sake of griping, because they don’t like change, no matter how trivial? Or is it something else that causes otherwise highly intelligent people to mentally flame out and be unable to figure stuff out that they might have been able to 15 years prior?
I really am curious; the amount of anger and irritation at the Discourse move is entirely baffling and confusing to me, because for me, it was like 15 minutes to figure out the basics, and then maybe a couple of weeks to figure out the nitty-gritty details of how to do everything I wanted to do, as well as learn some new stuff.
I’m 52 and so about in your age bracket, and the difference to other people older or even our generation may be if computers (almost) always have been a thing in their life or not. I started at 16 with my own C64 and with an Apple IIe at school and thus have been raised on computers, different hardware, different software and OSes and everchanging interfaces. I’m used to change, but people that later came in touch with computers have a harder time to follow the (natural) changes.
As I just stated in a different thread, my reaction to the entire changeover has been BFD.
It took me about 10 minutes to get the basics, after which I probably invested a total of several minutes picking up the nitty gritty stuff as I went along.
I’m comfortable with computers but am hardly what one would call an expert. And I’m a couple of months shy of 70.
You’re operating the way I’d expect a normal person to operate with respect to this sort of thing. That’s how I went about it as well- a handful of minutes to get the lay of the land, and then maybe a week’s worth of normal operation where I figured out how to do stuff that I hadn’t tried doing until then. It didn’t take me a week to figure anything in particular out; it took me a week of normal usage to cycle through all the operations I normally do and figure them all out.
I’m 61 and can adapt to shit just fine–recently took one laptop to Linux then back to Windows because I needed the greater hardware stability a newer box gives. Have had phones with different OS’s (but zero Apple products because fuck those guys) and I can troubleshoot, set up my own networking including integrating a VPN into the mix and use exclusively open source apps. My kids are in their forties and one is an Apple slave with basically zero troubleshooting ability and the other couldn’t be made to understand why it’s bad to let Windows save things where it wants to because you end up with 15GB of pictures crowding out the 20GB OS partition. It’s not age, it’s motivation and intention.
It’s not age- to some extent, it’s that people don’t like change but there’s also a not insignificant number of people who just don’t get technology and never did. I occasionally get frustrated with my mother, who keeps telling me her computer is “doing something on it’s own, I didn’t touch anything” and can never give me a complete email address because she thinks everyone has an aol email address. And then I remember trying to walk her through recording a show on her VCR in 1980 or so, when she was forty. I was unsuccessful and I never even tried teaching her to set the timer (the VCR plus was invented for people like her) - of course she’s going to have difficulty learning new things in 2020.
I’m 83 and perfectly comfortable with computers, but then I got my first PC 38 years ago. But my wife and I got Android smartphones a couple years ago and I have to say it defeats me. I can make and receive calls. I can make photos, but getting them off the phone just beats me. Sometimes I can and sometimes I do exactly the same thing and it doesn’t work. All I want to do is send them to my computer and I can deal with them from there. Every once in a while the phone emits a bleat and I cannot figure out why. I have sent and received text messages, but don’t feel comfortable typing on the tiny screen. But right now it claims I have 17 text messages, but whatever I do, I cannot get the damned machine to show me them. Really frustrating.
My cousin is 61 and he just down right doesn’t want to learn new things, but when he sees me using technology to an advantage he attempts to learn but falls short.
Like I spent an morning going to junk yards looking for motor with him, old school style. He didn’t find what he needed so I searched online while we ate lunch and found one. His lesson, don’t learn how to use Google just ask me. I had to shut that shit down.
Now he finally has a smart phone and I am consently reminding him to ask Google. But he still can’t figure out how to get to his phone messages sometimes. He forgets and waits a week until he finds someone to ask. So I say why did you not ask Google how to get to my phone messages and he is like I can do that?
Do you remember when Microsoft introduced the ribbon? Most regular users had incorporated where things were to be found, what to press, and what happened next down in their DNA. When it all changed, a huge roar of anger was heard across the land. I never understood what made the ribbon better than the old menu structure. All I knew was that I had to relearn all my habits, all my settings, and all my knowledge of process.
It was not a 10 minute process. I don’t believe for a second, let alone 10 minutes, that any of you made the switch here so easily. In the real world of users, every single change requires time to track down and learn. Moreover, changes are never encountered all at once. The first day you hit several, then the second day you did a few new things so you encountered more, and that kept recurring for the next couple of weeks. Each one of those could easily take ten minutes, especially given how totally non-intuitive Discourse’s UI is.
Like Hari, I’m a veteran user. My first computer was a Timex 2000 in 1984. I wrote help files professionally at one point (among many other things: I hated help files - nobody ever read them). The issue has nothing to do with age. It’s totally dependent on the time and patience the user is willing to impart to the change. One who is willing to plunge in and learn everything at once will find the charge trivial. Those who dip in and out of the structure will encounter a neverending series of obstacles. Worse, until the new becomes familiar, even the things learned one week won’t stay at the front of one’s mind the next.
Some people can pick up a new language almost by osmosis; some can’t do much after years of classes. I’m in the latter group. That’s been true all my life so please don’t try blaming it on age. The reality is that people, always, on everything, for every change, string along a continuum of ease of acceptance. Few, if any, will sit at the same point on the continuum for each new challenge. Those planning a change need to be aware of this reality. It was not evident here, and the result was rightly the legitimate complaints from the frustrated.
That makes you an extreme outlier. Most people have trouble with application interfaces from time to time. So much so that there are whole fields of expertise around building better interfaces for everything from a toaster to a message board.
I’m curious, what modern apps is it similar to? Because while I didn’t find it all that hard to learn, I’ve never used anything else much like it. I mean, in some sense every message board is like every other message board. But what is this more like than vBulletin is? Nothing that I’ve used.
Unless you mean it uses a standard “hamberger” menu for the menu, instead of something that says “menu”? Anything else?
I’ve used a LOT of computer interfaces, so I suppose at some point they all blur, and none is familiar.
Isn’t it more of a case that we’re not getting paid to post on the SDMB and it’s been a very conservative site over many years? This is our leisure. I’ve been slowly adapting and not complaining, but this isn’t a case of being told to learn a new system for work and be able to roll at 100% by Monday morning.
Also, a lot of app controls are designed to be intuitive to regular users (that is, mostly young people). Nothing in this is intuitive to my parents or to my MIL.
I’m in the middle- I can usually fumble my way to the functionality I want (if it’s there), but I’m getting a bit tired of stuff changing for, apparently, the sake of change.
This definitely happens. My mom, who has been using personal computers for decades, increasingly seems to be less able to do semi-basic things like finding where her files are in the filesystem.
That said: it’s not entirely her fault. Software design is increasingly shedding affordances and skeuomorphism, design features that help people figure out how interfaces work. The upgrade to Discourse is a great example. Buttons are now just flat rectangles, or even just words and icons that don’t show a rectangle until the mouse hovers. The old buttons appeared to have depth. They looked like buttons. Scroll bars got narrower and less obtrusive. Less-used features got relegated to “…” or hamburger menus. The upside of this is that the cleaner elegant look can be more pleasing, and can focus your attention on the thing that you are doing rather than all the controls. But the downside is that it’s harder to figure out how to do something with new software than it used to be.
Old people have more trouble with computers because we keep changing how the computers work.
No, not age related. I do work with a lot of Baby Boomers and have seen difficulties when we went with online learning; however, 1/2 of the employees are mechanics, electricians, welders. Paper documents and working with their hands is their learning style. I’m 48 and competent with computers. Like Windows, don’t like Apple although I have both. My challenge is the extra crap that is loaded on the phones and computers when I get them. Just give me what I want, phone, camera, text, etc. I’ve had iPhone for years but learned how to do a screen shot last year. Then again, I had a slide phone until 8 years ago… why is it so hard? I don’t care enough to spend my time learning these random things. Also the text keeps getting smaller.
You were my hero! Once I learned about help files, I spent a lot less money taking my first windows computer to the shop for them to fix what I “broke”, back when help files were, y’know, helpful.
Some of us learn by doing and “breaking” things. My experience is that with each change, a little utility, flexibility, customizability and over all good design disappears
