It’s interesting to know how people learn to use computers. What is all the more interesting is senior citizens who have crossed fifties and have been introduced to computers for the first time, do not pick up the essential skills to survive in the digital age(I do not mean to disrespect them in any way, they were from a different generation). I heard from my parents who both worked in banks how computerization would make their life difficult. They were touching fifties then and have since retired. We now know that computerization in banks is near total and it’s been a great success but at first there were apprehensions. They did not know whom to approach when there were problems. They were jealous of the younger colleagues who picked up the skills fast. There were stories of unhelpful colleagues.
I recently was called to help my neighbor who had returned from UK. His son had given him a laptop to learn using internet. He showed me a memory card that contained photos of the places he visited in UK. Instinctively I plugged in the card into the laptop and copied all the photos into the hard disk. His next question baffled me as he asked “How did you get the idea to copy the images into the laptop”. Now I know the storage capacity of a memory card is limited and that on the laptop is relatively more and I thought images in the card can be deleted to make space for new ones. He seemed to understand that as he asked me if I have deleted the images in the card which I had not done. The question he asked seemed to go beyond just the photos and seemed to sound like “How do you guys get to know what all can be done with computers”?.
To confess in private I myself am curious to know the answer. I mean some people do great work and others fall behind. When social networking sites came about they caught on the imagination of the people. Before even logging into one we instinctively seemed to understand that we can search for our friends on the site and form a group. That idea comes to us before we log into the site for the first time. We all were interested to know whether all of our friends were there on the site and they were. It was a great feeling to be participating in unification of some sort.
Meanwhile in my neighbor's house, I was actually called there to help him play a DVD of sai bhajans. The problem was that windows media player did not play the DVD for want of some decoder. I assured him of getting FLV player installed in his laptop, something which I never did. He had lectures of swami nityananda, whom he regarded as a great saint, in his laptop, and they opened. He told me had plans of launching a website on spirituality and healing. I grew conscious using his laptop and turned it towards him and instructed him to open “my computer”. He asked me “should I double click or single click?”. Opening by single click or double click is something we learn't very early in computer usage. We know that a single click on a folder in the side pane of explorer would show its contents on the right pane. We also learned that an icon can be double clicked to open or launch it. The problem was he was asking me every time if he is supposed to single click or double click and is not learning from past experience at all. One more thing i would like to add is in retrospect i now know double click is way too taxing on the fingers and the more number of times you are expected to do it, the more the pain. Esp when you look at the time between two clicks in order to be recognized as double.
All this I had experienced earlier while teaching my father how to use computers. He somehow does not understand that he needs two things, his mail id and password to log into yahoo. I have to remind him both. It was a difficult experience to teach him to tap on our laptop touch-pad. He knows how annoyed i get when people play pranks with me. I must confess i was pissed off the first time he came with "Teach me this". We all immediately “get it” the moment we see the cursor moving while we move our finger on the pad and on tapping it when the cursor is on an icon or button. We all would have tested it to see how it distinguishes the two events of lowering the finger on the pad with intent to drag or to tap.
I was once teaching my mother the T9 mode of typing a SMS on the mobile. This I was doing purposefully to let her know that there is a dictionary of words embedded. She was spot on with the question “How did it know I wanted to type “and” when I pressed the buttons marked ‘abc’ ‘mno’ and ‘def’ ”. She was in awe of the advances in technology.
This of course is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many such devices like the TV remote, DVD player and playing music on mobile and others which have some complexity as far as their UI is concerned. Xerox Inc and Apple Inc have done some great work on more intuitive UIs. The technical jargon I heard about this is "Device Level Human Factors". We seem to forget that we were in the same situation before we learned how to use them. The question my neighbor asked me is not an ordinary one and holds relevance to everyone no matter what their skill levels are.
