Quote:
Originally Posted by Superlucky
I've had people (especially older people) confide in me that they didn't think they could learn how to operate a computer/cell phone/DVD player/etc. if they tried for a million years. To these people (my grandmother included), the technology is so alien that they can't get their heads around the broad concepts needed to feel confident in attempting to learn how to use it. For some of them, saying that they don't want to learn is their way of suppressing their feelings of inferiority borne of their intuition that they would be incapable of learning even if they tried.
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I wouldn't feel bad if I were them. Between middle adults demonstrating the same trouble with many home electronics devices (you should hear my wife whine when she hits the wrong button on the TV remote), and kids who simply toss it aside when it takes them more than a minute to figure it out, it's pretty clear that design and usability needs to play a bigger role in consumer devices for all ages. (This is actually another area where e-book marketing misses the big picture, failing to demonstrate how simple it is.)
If anything, people should emphasize to them that it's not just them, it's often the design of the devices, which is just plain bad... and you don't blame them for not wanting to figure out how to deal with a bad design.