Example 1: I’m at work this morning. I’m checking in books or something, one of the librarians is at her computer. This person is fairly smart but not particularly tech savvy. She asks me if I know how to make the text on a webpage larger. I say that I think there should be an option under View, or you should be able to change the default in the options panel. She, without attempting, asks again how and I have to show her how to do so.
Example 2: A couple days ago my mother calls me. She asks me how to do something (sorting cells in a table or something; I don’t recall exactly) in Word. I tell her I think you can find the command to do that under Table but I’m not sure, so take a look there and if you can’t find it, call me back later when I’ll have the chance to boot into Windows (on my MacBook) and play around. Mom says instead she’ll call my dad and ask him.
Both of these people are intelligent and well-educated. They use computer every day. It’s not a lack of overall intelligence here.
It seems like there are two things feeding into this. One is a total lack of intuition ("How do I change the way I view a webpage? Maybe I should look under ‘view’!), which is weird, because as I said, these are smart people. The second issue seems to be an even-more baffling apprehension of actually using a computer to do things without hand-holding. You are not going to break the internet by poking around IE menus, and as long as you save your Word document, it’s not going to get sucked out of the computer. If you’re really paranoid, just save another copy of your document and play around with that one, leaving the other file completely untouched.
What causes this behavior, or am I just imagining it all together?
Well making the text bigger doesn’t always work on every webpage, depending on how it’s set up. People think there is only one way to make a website.
But as the “computer guy” at work I understand the question. For instance, everytime an admin has to do a mail merge I have to walk them through it. I am like you do it ONCE a month at LEAST, you should know how to do it. But I don’t mind, it’s obvious they aren’t comfortable with it.
People think computers are somehow mysterious and are afraid of them. On the flip side, I realize the MIS people want to scare the little guys so they don’t go infecting their computers. And there is some validity.
For instance, our MIS head guy at a company I worked for told everyone that if you delete a file and empty your trash bin it’s not really gone, you can still get it back. Well yeah it’s POSSIBLE to do this, and 99% of the time someone has done this, I’ve recovered it, but once he said that everyone got careless and started emptying the trash.
So people feel if I try to make the text bigger and I screw it up I’ll never get it back to normal. It’s safer to ask so if something DOES go wrong, someone will know what I did and be able to help fix it.
People develop mental schemata of how systems work. If they don’t have enough expertise to have effectively developed appropriate mental models, they tend to be very unclear of how to approach problem-solving tasks. As Markxxx notes, a side effect of this is being reluctant to make changes because they’ll be unclear on how to return to a known-good state.
I’m in my 50s. I’ve been using computers daily for 25 years (and I wasn’t even an early adopter.) To this day, I have a nagging fear that if I try to tinker with something THE COMPUTER WILL BLOW UP, the hard drive will melt and I’ll not only lose the computer but every piece of data I ever typed – even if I typed it on a different computer and backed it up six different ways. I am also convinced that the hard copies I have in the file cabinet across the room will burst into flames.
people who didn’t grow up using a computer tend to be less willing to just go ahead and trying something on a computer. They’re just less comfortable with the “well, this might fuck it up, but I can always go back to my previous save” sort of attitude. Basically, they’re just not as used to to the demon-boxes as some of us are
I agree with PopeJewish. Most of these cases that I’ve seen in my brief stint in IT stemmed from the facts that people don’t understand how computers work and they are not used to the idea of (almost) always being able to restore things to a previous state.
Of course, as Markxxx points out, sometimes people go to the other extreme and start trusting that ability too much. I’ve even been guilty of that a few times in my life.
I have a tendency to do something like this to my husband (although I’m less passive than the people you describe - if I get a “try this” type of tip, I will follow it before asking for more help). My reason? He is absolutely brilliant when it comes to computers, and can fix just about any problem or figure out any command. If we’re in our shared office and something is holding me up, 9 times out of 10 asking him for the answer will be faster than trying to figure it out myself.
I was just discussing this with a client yesterday. People who didn’t grow up with computers (I’m probably in the first generation which did, barely) often times don’t really understand what they are doing. They have learned certain actions by rote: click here, type this, pull down this menu. They have never learned how computers or the Internet actually works. I likened it to cooking: there are some people who are perfectly capable of following a recipe, and making a decent meal, but when you watch the chefs on *Iron Chef *, they aren’t following a cookbook - they know how to cook, and if something goes wrong, how to fix it.
I think it’s actually a great tribute to modern software and OS design that so many people can actually be reasonably productive on a computer without ever having read a manual.
I don’t think it’s a gender thing. My mom was a marine scientist back when women by and large didn’t go into science or were just beginning to be accepted. The other person is…well…neither un-confident nor particularly feminine, so I don’t think that’s it.
The cooking example actually helps put this in perspective a lot, I think, because thinking about it, I’m to cooking as my mother is to computers. I grew up with computers (we got a desktop when I was four or five), but not cooking. If I’m not sure how to do something on a computer, I still know the basics like the back of my hand, so I’m comfortable fiddling around. Cooking scares me though, and fairly recently I had to call my mother and ask what exactly it meant to cook veggies until they were tender. I know what tender means, but in that context I just couldn’t put it together.
Though in my defense, there is a legitimate chance that cooking vegetables improperly could result in fiery death, whereas as long as your computer is still firmly in it’s case and you’re not poking it, you’re not going to set it on fire.
I guess it’s still strange to me because from my perspective, having been born in 1986 and having a tech geek for a father, rudimentary computer skills weren’t really consciously learned any more than writing with pencil and paper.
And WRT using manuals and such, my mom was aghast when I bought a Mac last year and did not buy an OS X guide or sign up to take a class. My dad, who is a geek and engineer and computer-ish guy by trade, heard us talking about it and wondered out loud why you would buy a book or even read the guide that came with before you broke something. Somewhere, there is a happy medium.
I’ve noticed that with most of the people I’ve ended up helping, the answer is often right on the page. If they would read the actual text in the error box, or just read through the menu choices, or read the dialog that just opened up, they’d know what to do.
I think there’s a sort of gap where people just accept that they don’t know what they’re doing and then it doesn’t even occur to them that they could figure it out just by paying attention. They just assume they won’t understand it so they don’t bother reading. It’s kind of a scary gap that I hope I don’t fall into one day.
One of the changes I noticed first between Vista and XP is that in Vista the dialogs for saving or moving files tend to be much larger and more verbose. Where before you might see a dialog with three buttons
-SAVE- -SAVE AS A COPY- -CANCEL-
now in Vista you get a big screen that explains in verbose language what your choices are. It does exactly what the old dialogs do but’s pretty and bright and no longer looks like a win95 relic. I’ve often wondered who made the change and what they’re internal testing looks like. My (limited) experience suggests that the problem is people won’t read whether its verbose or terse. I’d like to see what MS’s testing on the subject shows.
Nah. My father was the king of learned helplessness when it came to computers. Typical conversations went like this:
dad: How do you do X on the computer?
me: Go to the File menu–
dad: --I can’t do that! File menu? Just show me.
me: sits down and opens File menu The File menu is up here and then you go–
dad: I can’t do that! You do it! Just make it work.
me: :rolleyes:
Seriously, he wouldn’t even try to learn what I was teaching him. Drove me nuts.
I could be wrong, but I’m willing to bet NinjaChick’s Mom was an adult before the PC became a common place thing. I’m “good with computers” according to my older coworkers, too, and given they’re reasonably intelligent I assume I’m more comfortable with computers since I was in first grade when I first started using one and they didn’t grow up with them.
I have this exact problem. It isn’t intuitive to me. There doesn’t seem to be a logical progression of steps. The titles of some of the actions don’t fit with what I’m trying to do. And sometimes, you can’t tell if what you have done is working, thinking about working, might work next week or after lunch, or wasn’t possible in the first place. How many times have I sat there, letting the little bar that says “loading attachment” keep spinning round and round like a barber pole, and absolutely no attachment is loading, or ever will? And I’m considered the expert on the computers at my workplace, so you can imagine what the other two women are going through, only one of whom spends anytime on a computer at home.
I know how to do what I know how to do, and if I don’t do it everyday, and have the steps written down, I may forget what to do. I work on what is basically a Windows-based word processing program that runs a piece of machinery. At my store location, the screen is just fine. But when I work on it at another store, the command buttons/task bars/function buttons are too small, and I can’t seem to make them bigger. I can make OTHER things bigger, but not the stuff i need. I would like to call tech support for help, but I’m a bit embarrassed because I don’t know what the darn things are called! Now Kelly and Abby in tech support are very sweet to me, but twice now I have called with problems they have never seen before (in over 700 stores) and can’t figure out how to fix. I think they feel I have too much time on my hands, when I should be selling stuff!
In some programs you can move or even close the toolbars and menus. I’ve done this a few times, sometimes I wasn’t even sure what toolbar I closed until months later when I needed to use it, but couldn’t find it.
Heh. I was fortunate enough to have two experiences which made me the Fearless Tamperer that I am today:
My first-ever computer had a 500 MB hard drive (ooooh!) and a 14.4 modem. In very short order, my fancy art program that I got for Christmas conflicted with my stoneage antivirus program, and I got a ridiculously persistent BSOD.
No problem, I thought, I have 6 months of free tech support.
First thing the guy did was have me open the case, & short out the CMOS battery!
That didn’t work. Neither did anything else. I spent the next 3 days just trying all kinds of stuff, because I had just got the damn thing, and I wanted to play with it!
Finally, I put in the floppy disk that came with the PC so you could register it. I had already registered my computer, but I just wanted to see something on the screen besides “FATAL ERROR.”
Fixed it right up. Yep.
I have gotten a master boot virus that suddenly & unexpectedly wiped everything irretrievably off my HD. I’ve lost the contents of a few hard drives to various disasters. After it happens enough times, it’s just not so scary. Plus, by then, you’ve had lots of practice re-installing your OS.
P.S. never, ever double-click on a file with the extension “.reg”. Ever.
