Oops, old age creeping up, forgot to post, 50 on the next day of the moon
I’m generally OK with interface changes. What burns me is when icons change on my phone/tablet for absolutely no good reason. Google Maps changed their icon recently, from a picture of a map to a picture of a POI. How does that make any sense? A camera app I use changed its icon from something that looks like a camera to some abstract black and gold thing that looks like a lame flag.
And Apple, bless their fucking hearts, won’t give me the option to define my own icons because - well, I never have figured out why.
And you kids get off my lawn!!!
I can completely confuse the holy fucking hell out of younguns simply by defining my own file structure outside of whatever stupidy shit the OS does. Put an unusually named folder off the root directory and ask one of those “digital natives” to find a file inside it and watch the fun. Probably for hours.
A lot of technological change happens in a lifetime these days, more of it and at a faster pace than at any time in history. If you are able to keep up with it, most changes seem gradual enough that you can adapt. But after a while it gets a bit much to take, when the thing you spent the last few years getting to grips with, changes yet again. And if a particular technology happens to evolve without you using it and then suddenly you’re forced to take it up, e.g. a smartphone or tablet, it’s not so gradual and can be a steep learning curve.
I have reached the age where I’d like things to not be in such a hurry to be so diametrically different to the previous versions, please. I’ve finally got things just where I like them, and which I know works for me, and would very much rather that wasn’t taken away from me all the time.
I use an offshoot browser from Firefox (called Waterfox), using legacy plug-ins. Every one of them is obsolete or outdated now, but they work. Soon that won’t be true anymore, and I will be forced to switch to a browser interface I will not like, where features I am used to will not exist in it, or be hidden away in some obscure place with a new name, and new features will replace them despite being no improvement (and possibly are worse). And this kind of change will not stop, happening over and over until I die.
I am just so tired.
Dementia is a real risk if you live long enough, but I’ve never heard of “computer dementia”. If there is a problem with a glut of poorly-designed software and/or hardware (keep in mind at least 80% of everything is useless crap anyway), that affects every user regardless of age, and the solution is to support the development of good software.
Yeah, change fatigue and interfaces are now mostly designed for phones and older people don’t use their phones as much.
Controls with soft edges and input fields with no borders when viewed on a desktop. Controls that get moved.
None of it improves anything, it just rearranges it.
Windows 10 has a lovely feature that the default Windows Explorer is Documents. Not my Computer, Documents, along with a number of other conveniences that Microsoft has decided I should have. Which means I had to go through and set things differently because I do have to remap network drives quite often, and I actually need to find something on my C.
I know that there are many people who can use their computers, especially at work, and never have to touch a lot of these things. So I can understand why Microsoft decided to serve the majority. Those of us who want to be able to control their computer experience are finding the progression of Windows to be rather annoying.
I’ll agree with some of the others. It sometimes seems that the vendor has decided that the operating system should have changes, just so it looks new. Yes, I know it’s not Windows 3.1. And I’m glad of it, and having a mouse. Doesn’t mean I like fighting with SharePoint and other settings that seem to be random.
Age: 50
First computer: Commodore 64 (at home) and TRS-80 (at school)
The ability to learn new skills does decline with age; sad but true.
However, I think there’s also a self-identity component to it, and a misconception about learning software:
For much of my life, when I told people I was a software engineer, the standard response was “I’m no good with computers”. And, in discussion, it was obvious to me that they did not even really try to understand software or hardware. Furthermore, they imagined that to “geeks” like me, we just magically know how to use any software, and might be surprised to discover we need to invest time and effort to learn new stuff, and also get stuck from time to time.
Nowadays a blanket “I’m no good with computers” has become less common, and less socially acceptable (not to say people look down on you, but it certainly isn’t the normal position to take any more), but there’s still a generation of people that formed their personal image prior to that transition.
Change fatigue here, age 63. I spend a great deal of my time learning new software. My employer has just this year changed email and calendar software brands, and social media brands, and changed how our files are accessed in the cloud, and changed how we make secure connections, and a bunch of other things about how we do the routine parts of our jobs. Each of these things keeps getting updated, and we keep having trainings where all the arbitrary details get listed and we’re thereafter expected to be competent with them. I’m told these are all valuable necessary changes, but don’t feel any benefit myself. This is all just the diffuse background required for being an employee.
On top of that I am learning complicated new software skills for a new technical field (computational fluid dynamics) that fill books. This is really necessary. I do feel considerable benefit from these.
Then in my personal life, Apple as opposed to PC, I have all the other things going on, plus my spouse asking for help with her PC.
It feels like endless churn, most of it pointless. Too many different brands, companies buying each other like pawns, people coming up with obscure new names and trying to create buzz.
I’m tired of opening my vistas with fresh new paradigms. I just need to fucking print.
(In response to Hariseldon) I can sympathize: Android apps have rather idiosyncratic design choices. I’m not sure what’s going on with your text messages (it may depend on which platform you mean: the normal texts, or Whatsapp?), but with the camara pictures I’d advise to connect the phone by USB and use the Android File transfer app on your computer. That opens a file browser by which you can browse the files on your phone (at least the user relevant files). The pictures are saved in the DCIM folder on your phone (you can change the location to an SD card).
The details about this I found by googling around, unfortunately there are no good manuals for Android that I know of.
As Blue_Blistering_Barnacle says: “Some of us just get change fatigue.” This is me in spades. I’ve been involved with computer systems since 1971, both school and career employment. When I turned 50 or so I had had enough of learning new stuff. I just wanted to be a dumb user. I wanted to stop learning stuff that had a limited shelf life.
QFT!!
There are legitimate increases in functionality along the way. But so much of this is just churn for churn’s sake.
This is huge. The goal of making “computers” usable on a 2"x4" screen has made them much harder to use on the dual 18"x30" screens I actually use.
Back to the learning / changing issue, here's an analogy.
It’s commonly said that men navigate by a mental map that’s structured like a tradition paper map, a top-down view from up in the sky that records the relationship between each thing on the ground.
Whereas women navigate more like a railroad train; there’s a set of mental tracks between any two destinations that leads past various landmarks and the whole thing is “viewed” mentally looking out the windshield, not down from the sky. It’s very much “Turn left at the McDonalds, turn right at the Post Office, then the dog-groomer’s is just past the 7-11 on the right.”
How much of the above is actual biology and how much is social conditioning and how much is faulty stereotype is a hijack I’d rather not trigger. The point remains there are these two distinct navigational styles that different people use in different proportions.
Given that …
In the former nav scheme, replacing a building on a street corner changes nothing. In the latter scheme, the same landmark change invalidates every track that depended on that building and suddenly “you can’t get there from here”. And more importantly, at the limit “you can’t figure out how to get there from here.”
Adding or subtracting a road may invalidate a familiar route for a map-oriented person. But by being map-oriented an alternate route can quickly and surely be calculated and tried. Adding a road does nothing to improve a track-oriented nav scheme and subtracting a road, like changing a landmark, may completely derail a vast number of tracks with no means of recovery.
With all that …
Many people memorize how to use the computer as a series of discrete steps with no comprehension of how they “work” collectively to achieve the whole. They don’t know, much less understand, the organizing principles of e.g. the Files menu has stuff for opening & saving, while the Edit menu has stuff for editing. Nor even the idea of there being a hierarchy of categories of actions. To them it’s all just “Click this, click that, click the other thing.” Those folks are utterly track-oriented navigators with zero “map of the land” in their head.
As such, those folks are lost, Lost, LOST, when the landmarks move. And they have zero “handle” to grab the new UI by to begin to feel their way around to begin re-orienting themselves to the new landmarks.
And especially so when the landmarks all move at once. It’s like trying to drive in a town after a tornado or hurricane has obliterated every single building. That’s what the pre- and post- Ribbon UI with Office felt like to those folks and what the vBulletin to Discourse change feels like to them now.
Couple that with low motivation to learn, decreased dexterity and eyesight with age (I’m 62 and despite my fancy spectacles my browser is set to 125% zoom), and you have a recipe for people falling by the wayside as tech progresses. Then very quickly being left hopelessly behind.
For most folks, failing long- and short-term memory sets in much later. But that’s the death knell for computer use. It’s where my aged MIL is now. By the time she finishes scanning all the clutter on a given web page she’ll have forgotten what she was trying to accomplish. And the 100 buttons on the ribbon of a word processor are just 100 blurry mysteries. If she learns during one session that [B] means Bold and it’s the 5th button in the second section that info will be gone 15 minutes later.
Thanks, I will try that.
I am very fortunate that the main software I use, TeX, has not changed (save for one minor upgrade in 1989 to improve foreign language interface) since 1982. And I have used the same editor (which has been upgraded to windows) since 1984. On the rare occasion I have had to use Word, I just shudder. One of the worst things is how hard it is to find files in the file system. Using my editor, I choose the file system for my convenience.
Some great observations there, LSLGuy!
Wow. That really helped me to understand, thank you!
I’m another one who’s always found it easy to navigate and learn new software. Even if it’s not intuitive, if you have a basic idea of how things work, and why they work that way, you just poke around until you figure it out. (I’m 50, and got my first computer in 1999)
I wish “Preferences” wasn’t also sometimes called “Options” or “Settings” and sometimes under the File menu, sometimes the Edit menu, sometimes the Tools menu, sometimes the Help menu.
Everyone’s “standards” aren’t standard.
I remember teaching my then boss, aged about 55, in the late 1990s, how to do some stuff on the computer. He held the mouse like it would bite him and he wrote all the steps down for what he was trying to do. Of course the steps relied on starting from a known state, so if the computer wasn’t in that state (e.g. no programs open) then he was stuffed. And if he missed a step or his button click didn’t take then he was also stuffed. He might double click too slowly on the email icon and then be bamboozled by the fact the email program didn’t open. He wouldn’t just double click the icon again because he wasn’t sure what the problem was, all he knew was that he’d followed the steps and they hadn’t worked.
The flip side was that he thought I was some kind of genius because I could fix all his computer problems. Of course all I was doing was going through the menus until I found some likely looking function and clicking to see if it helped or not.
For me, now aged 46, it’s change fatigue. I kept up with Windows until that shit one, Windows 7? I heard it was horrible and decided to go to a Mac instead. Been using Macs ever since. I still have a Windows OS (10 I think) on my Mac but I use it infrequently and have no need to learn it in any detail.
I used to look forward to MacOS upgrades but lost interest at some point when I realised there were just a few things I use a computer for and they are all largely unaffected by the latest and greatest OS.
I used to always get the latest iPhone or iPad when it was time to upgrade, but again I’ve become comfortable that I only need them to do a limited number of things and my next purchases will be for mid range models.
My mother has a Frankenstein smart home mostly controlled by Alexa. She got me one for a present, along with some smart lights and various other things, but I’d just much rather use wall switches for lights and remotes for TVs etc.
So, I guess at some point in my life I went from being keen to be at the forefront of consumer technology to being comfortable with what I had and not really interested in keeping up anymore.
I’m a college professor, and I’m not convinced it’s an age thing at all. Or if it is, there’s a weird horseshoe-theory-like thing going on where the very young and the very old are equally clueless. An amazing number of students seem to find instructions like “save your paper as a .docx, .pdf, or .rtf file with your last name in the file name, and send it as an e-mail attachment” absolutely incomprehensible. (On a good day, they send a link to Google Docs, and then forget to give me permission to access the document; on a bad day, they cut and paste the entire text of the paper into the body of the e-mail, because apparently the concept of a “file attachment” is totally foreign. My parents, born in 1946, would have absolutely no difficulty following these instructions.)
You probably mean Win8. I hope so, anyway. Windows 7 was good. I still use it because Win10 changes so much it removes my ability to use a lot of the apps I have relied on for decades.
I think it’s about different cohorts being accustomed to different paradigms. The young aren’t used to “files”, let alone attaching files. Everything just sort of lives in the cloud.
It’s easy to learn new software that follows the same paradigms and design principles as software you are already familiar with. It’s hard to learn new paradigms, though.