Technology’s outgroup
The media regularly assert that the “younger generation” will comprise technical savants, fluidly emailing while watching YouTube while chatting with friends (on the phone and through IM, which increasingly overlap) while designing flying cars and nanobots. The claim boils down to the simple conclusion that new technologies are created by the young and for the young, and only the young can understand it - cue the clichéd joke parents make about needing their four-year-old to program the VCR (that is so 80’s). Sure, technology is rarely self-explanatory. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.
Many people who would otherwise be entirely capable of learning the step-by-step procedures of basic technical tasks are convinced that they do not have the innate skills to do so. I see this as a problem not because it increases the burden on those who know how to do these sorts of things (although any IT help desk person will tell you that’s the truth), but because the non-believers remove themselves from the opportunities that many technologies provide. iPods and DVD players are trivial, but technologies like solar water heating and satellite navigation are not, and offer great ways to help people operate sustainably and effectively.
The question arises, of course, where did this idea come from and can anything be done about it?
There are a variety of reasons why this could be happening, and they essentially derive from the psychology of learning. Our social structure targets education toward the young - you’re born, you go to school, you go to work, you die (with marriage and kids and retirement in Florida thrown in at some point). While the need for “continuing education” is increasingly recognized, it still smacks of the abnormal, with many colleges, universities, and trade schools scurrying to find a politically correct term for the non-traditional//mature/returning/continuing-ed students. So social norms steer people away from active learning, but other stereotypes feed the inertia as well, such as the belief that “an old dog can’t learn new tricks” - which has some empirical support in cognitive developmental research, but if it were absolutely true we wouldn’t be arguing over the value and limitations of experience for Clinton and Obama.
So what can we do?
The intuitive solution is to make technology easier to access and use. Work on the interface. Make text and arrows bigger. Use fewer buttons with clearer labels. Make form match function - make the part afford its usefulness. There is well-recognized room for improvement here, and future articles will explore how these issues are being addressed in Human Computer Interaction and related fields. The more difficult approach, which avoids the platitude of “make it better”, is to convince people that technology is not a hallowed, sacred area of knowledge attended by geeks with insider information. It does not define an outgroup. It simply describes the use of new tools - a deeply (though not exclusively) human pursuit.
This principle - that the use of technology is a universal trait, not the select domain of the “younger generation” - suggests a new frame for discussing usability. In many ways, it undermines the popular user-centered conception of usability because that term requires there to be a separation between a tool and a user, and an array of fundamental differences among users. Treating tool use (and technology in general) as universal among humans instead means that usability lies in the interface between tool and environment. Instead of pitching technology toward a group of users (or “market”), it can instead be pitched toward a use - a new (and hopefully better) way to get things done.
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