My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
Maybe kids have a leg up on the boomers that only had slide rules growing up, but I believe that tech literacy is much lower than people realize. Beyond the bare minimum of using email and browsing the web, most people generally just don’t aren’t using computers in a deep way, including kids that just grow up consuming content on tablets. Touch screens actively obscure the complexity of computers to make them more intuitive.
This research was published nearly 10 years ago but I it’s relevant today: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Speaking of obscurity, nowadays when errors occur it seems like programs and websites are too afraid to show you the details of the error outside of a generic, sometimes witty “Something happened” or “We dropped the magnifying glass”. I know that’s been a thing for a long time but it is frustraiting that users seem to be being protected from detailed errors more and more.