How to deal with technophobes (IT and otherwise)

Alex wrote:

I had to chuckle because this just described my dad, God bless him.

Sounds familiar.

My wife called me on video last night, in complete hysterical meltdown because she couldn’t program the GPS in the car to get to the commercial airport Eventually I determined that her problem was in programing the post code, which for US zip codes requires that you switch the screen to numbers not letters. This is a woman who went from knowing only Bavarian dialect plus a tiny bit of English to completely fluent in English after the age of 50.

My father was (and to a degree still is at 92) a technical genius, valued by many and paid pretty well for his insight into structural engineering design. He also refused to use a computer in his work, leaving that to the kids. His mantra in this regard was “I refuse to subjugate my life to pushing buttons in the right order” His value was in the ability to quickly understand what was happening in physical terms, do some classical calculations and fix it in a simple way, something that very few people can do. He’d be so far ahead of the analysts it would take them weeks to catch up, and sometimes they never did.

The problem with software and UI designers is that they often design their work for people who think like themselves, and one wonders whether they know any other type of person exists. This is their weakness, not their prospective customers failing. Unfortunately as we see in some of the attitudes expressed on this subject the same block headed, narrow focus IT-based world view has over the last 40 years spread across society more generally.

I totally relate to the above

Just been in Greece for a week or two, and used Google Maps for satnav. GM is the worst UI POS imaginable. I am told that Google have too many sofas around their offices and this leads to incredibly arrogant “paradigm generation”. The bloody thing often stopped audio guidance, which was ok because I could drive while Justine would issue instructions (a good mode generally ) but if she was driving alone it would be near-impossible. And the old offline-mapdata programs (Tomtom, Sygic, etc) have lost so many users to GM that they have pretty well been abandoned and don’t run properly on current phones.

And the old offline-mapdata programs (Tomtom, Sygic, etc) have lost so many users to GM that they have pretty well been abandoned.

What should be changed in GMs interface to make it less POS and as successful with users as the offline mapdata programs?

Peter wrote:

GM is the worst UI POS imaginable.

Is it?

I hated old-school car sat navs because they had a specific database you had to work with and this usually involved having to establish how the destination you wanted was listed in the database. It might have been ok for street addresses, but one (or at least I) rarely seemed to use it to drive to someone’s house. More often than not one was going to a business or venue of some sort and the ability to just search (i.e. Google) was a revelation.

So if I want it to take me to Shoreham Airport I can just type (or say) Shoreham Airport. I don’t have to worry about whether the database lists it as Brighton City Airport, or what the street address or postcode is. I can even mis-spell it, quite badly, and it’ll still work.

I’m afraid I recognise myself in much of what has been written here. It is even worse for a 92 year old parent who no matter how hard we have tried cannot retrieve a message or text on her protable phone (and we’re not talking Smartphone here)
The parts of the post I don’t recognise myelf in are the parts I simply do not have a clue what you are talking about."Magento, PCI,DSS. Haven’t a clue.
Yes I am the one who managed to wipe the config file whilst typing up a list. How did I do it. No one knows.
I detest having to change printer inks. You change the one the printer software tells you is empty only to find, suddenly that all are now empty.
Software developers love to make up new names or words just as you’ve learnt the old word or name for the same thing.
Why do things just stop and not tell you that they’ve actually stopped rather than keep tou hanging on for ages to see if something is really happening. I remember an editing software on Windows NT which if it went wrong this Dr Watson was doing something. I wasted hours waiting for something to happen on several occasions before someone pointed out that it did nothing and I would be better off re-booting.
I am pretty good at logical things but many solutions to IT and software problems are in no way logical. They are supposed to be communication solutions but they are often written by people who are in reality only capable of communicating within a very small cadre of people.
When Windows98 or Windows NT came out did anyone bother to explain to the people that bought it that the only way to really delete something was to do it in MsDos. Even today if you want to properly uninstall a program on Mac Catalina or Windows 10 you have to uninstall many items individually and without a prompt. And then you’ve got to be careful that that file is not used by some other piece of software.
Thank God for Smartphones and Apps, they have made things so much simpler for us old technophobes as ling as we can get over the fear of the technology and what it is doing and of course that there is not some wide boy out there who is either trying to scam us or get our bank details.
@Mooney_Driver No most of us do not do it out of spite🙂

We love Google maps and using them with the GPS on the smartphone we have found it much more accurate than the built in GPS.
It has the built in advantage that it feeds directly into my wife’s hearing aids so she can now hear the directions better. Another gold star for the smartphone and its apps.

Among my friends and relatives, I tend to be the primary point of contact for any IT troubles, and I am indeed able to fix most problems. However, when it comes to my own IT solutions, I tend to be fairly conservative:

• I don’t use software that requires Internet connection if the same functionality is available offline. My car navigation software (iGo) does get real-time traffic from Internet, but the navigation database is in my phone. All my data backups are on physical media in my possession (except one small file with well-encrypted access credentials for various web sites).
• I don’t use software that requires a user account or needs to be linked to my phone number if the same functionality is available anonymously.
• If a desktop solution meets my needs, I won’t switch to a mobile one unless I actually need it in my pocket.
• I strongly prefer data storage formats that are human-readable (e.g. XML) or at least can be reasonably manipulated with a hexadecimal editor or a similar generic tool.
• I won’t willingly use a solution that assumes too much about my way of thinking (e.g. anything by Apple and many things by Google). When I am forced to, such assumptions tend to be wrong anyway.
• I won’t use a complex solution if its only advantage over a simple one is eye candy. When I needed to write a simple web site a few months ago, it took me less time to write it manually in pure HTML than I would have spent studying Wordpress and looking for the right template.

So, in the eyes of the young generation, am I a technophobe or what?

Life is certainly very hard for many people.

What willl be interesting – but we will all be dead before this can be verified – whether future generations will be any different.

IOW, is there something inherent in the human brain which makes some % of people not “get” this machine interface stuff?

OTOH, what tends to happen, over years, is “convergence”. Basically, common life tasks become simpler. For example, most people are incapable of correctly reading a traditional electricity meter

but more and more of them are digital, and over time they will all be remotely read.