And when you're older, do you think you'll be able to keep up with the whipper-snappers?
I'm gonna try to teach my 80+ year old grandma how to use computers/the Internet pretty soon. Of course nowadays it's really easy to get started, but there's still that initial hump for some older people, at least, even with simple modern UIs.
I'm already older and the answer is no. You just don't care about all the ins and outs of toys since you've gone decades without needing them and you still don't need them.
You rise above celebrity gossip and "M...muh GAYMERGATE" idiocy too.
>What is it that tends to make it harder for old people to grok new tech?
Is there actually data that it's harder for old people? I meet a lot of young retards, so I'm lacking a frame of reference.
Other than that, probably the whole GUI as a metapher thing yada yada and the separate fact that every UI could look like everything.
>Is there actually data that it's harder for old people?
Not sure. I mean, it's a common meme. But I guess it could be inaccurate.
To throw in another theory:
Beside maximum arbitraryness of computer interfaces, it could be the fact that a computer is a metamachine. To some extent, even a smartphone is.
There were no metamachines back then, as far as I can tell.
That makes sense. Yeah, the concept of a universal machine that can simulate the action of any circuit up to certain physical limitations can be said to be higher-level that the concept of a single-role machine.
I teach computers for a living
One of the biggest challenges is that there's a "visual grammar" that most people don't realize they're picking up on. So if you just tell someone "click here, click here, then here, bam now you printed" they learned to poke those spots, but not that they can tweak what they did a little to get to the Save menu instead of Print, etc.
Here's another example, this mom managed to get to the chat app, but due to the minimalistic styling and lack of labels, doesn't pick up on the "right side is you, left side is who you're talking to" hint because nobody told her.
So bear in mind you're going to have to explain both what a menu/window etc is, AND what your visual cues are that something is a menu/clickable/movable
Thanks for the advice user, I'll keep that in mind when talking to my grandma.
>grok
faggot.
Another thing that's really important is people are bad learners when they're scared of doing something wrong, or frustrated because something DID go wrong.
For dealing with scared, one option I use (though I have more training gear than a home user would) are VMs, because then you can say "you can literally fuck up the whole computer and I can fix it instantly with one button, failing isn't bad"
And for frustrated, a lot of people will guess their way through a process, get angry, get stuck on step 5, then ask you for help. If you're in on the ground on step one BEFORE they get salty that helps
she wrote that and somehow thought someone else wrote it to her?
what an idiot
She's used to the idea of writing a letter (or possibly an email) where what you said is either totally gone, or shoved down at the bottom. She probably wrote her son a message, forgot what she said (cause it was just a generic love note) then opened her phone an hour later to check and just assumed that if there's ANY text, it must be him.
That makes sense. I'll be teaching her how to use an iPad, so it suspect it would probably be pretty hard for her to fuck anything up anyway. But I'll read up on whether that's actually the case, and let her know if so.
Didn't she see her sent text immediately show up in the history? She must be an idiot, or very slow.
I've witnessed a beardlet trying to preach to a 70+ yr old UNIX beard/grand wizard of C. It didn't end well.
> Splurmgefx
Honestly, why bother?
To make it easier to keep in touch with me, so she can read more news and stuff like that (she likes reading newspapers), so she can see what all the fuss is about, etc... I mean, I don't know how much she'll get into it, but I'd like to at least give her the opportunity and see what happens.
Fucking newfag.
She's gonna die soon, why bother? Go lift some weights
'grok' is such a dumb word. Why not just use 'understand'?
English is a dumb language. Thank you Amerifats.
>Thinking no one has noticed you've been consistently trying to research this topic here so you can try to write phone ads for old people
Stop that.
You’ve got to understand the lack of interest. As a kid, I spent the great majority of my time outdoors doing shit with other neighborhood kids. The idea of just sitting around in my room watching tv or playing video games was Bubble Boy type shit tier retard. Same with living with parents past age 18. Retarded. Now, every kid is some kind of autist that knows how to score 700 on retard pong on his iPad, but never climbed a tree, kissed a girl, played a pickup game of football in the street, hiked overnight without tent and wiped his ass with leaves... It’s like kids today think the old are dumb for living real life and the old have no interest in learning some contrived BS led screen lifestyle they associate with being disabled.
Ur dum.
L33t haxxor jargon is not for the dums.
I've known plenty of adults that can use and learn how to use technology, the difference between them and your aunt who needs help plugging in their router is that they're not scared.
You have to remember that baby boomers and greatest generationals and hugely impressed with technology to an excessive degree, it's crippling.
old people have crystallized intelligence, but unless they've been trying to stay sharp and had cognitive challenges throughout their life, it's very hard to actually learn new things
Look at people who are actually successful and had to think their way out of problems all their lives (engineers, high level managers, scientists etc.) and they'll do fine even with unfamiliar tech
I was born in 1982 so oldfag at 36 now. All I can say is that when I was a teenager(13 and up) fucking NOONE I knew was really into computers like I was. It was just a passing curiosity to most of my friends. Now they're all fucked losers and I'm doing quite well for myself which makes me really sad. That said I started learning how shit worked on a 386 and have been learning ever since. I can't really fathom that at some point I'm just going to stop learning new shit. I think some of my generation, and what is clear to me is that 3 or 4 years behind my generation the will to continuously learn and improve technology is much more consistent. We've grown up in an environment where the change is synonymous with personal success and so we embrace it. Kids just a few years older than me were stupid as fuck and saw it as a fad or something and were therefore more focused on prior generation matters of importance and didn't learn the same learning cycles.
Further technology may continue to get more complex with DevOps, AI, Machine learning etc for another decade or so, but at the same time things will be getting insanely easier for the masses who aren't in the backoffice making all this wondrous shit happen.
UX designers are everywhere now.
Also, in my career I've seen old people who had no fucking knowledge of anything technical learn to program and become quite successful with it. OLD people.
I don't think they lack the ability to learn as easily. They've just been trained to learn different ways.
Fuck yeah this
I became a borderline autist because of videogaymes and the internet. wish I knew they would fuck me up and my parents didn't let me play so much with myself