The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
![[HN] The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)](https://radiation.party/pictrs/image/4ef49f80-de69-4f62-b122-44f3564fefb0.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
Nielsen and Norman group know what’s up. I learned this at my first office job. Everyone thought I was a wizard hacker when I showed them inspect element. I got in trouble with my director who flagged IT Security when I showed my team lead an inspect element on some intranet page. I had changed a title to something else as a proposal and they had thought I had hacked their intranet and changed it myself. Triggered a whole security incident.
I thought everyone with a computer knew about this. I was wrong.
i used to worked for a public school district, and i once pointed out a guys laptop was infested with porn popups (~2000). the cops investigated me for reporting it.
That’s absolutely fucking bonkers. I’m hoping that this didn’t cause you any lasting consequences at work.
Need some more details here.
A "guys" laptop? Like a student or a faculty member?
Did you report it to the police or to the IT department or other faculty? Who were you in this school? Teacher?
What do you mean by the cops "investigating" you? Like asking a few questions to get it on record? Or getting into your computer? Were they accusing you of something? Who called them in the first place?
Wow, this is bleak.
I read somewhere (I think the deloitte tech survey from a few years ago) that many people have replaced their pc with smartphones and use their phone as their primary tech device. Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.
I work in tech at a credit union and we’ve hit a weird full circle point where the new folks entering the job market need a lot of training on using a computer for this reason. It’s been very bizarre being back at a point where I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets.
They're also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it's identical, and you're incapable of using marginally more complex things.
It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.
When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.
It's also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.
Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.
So you start making things that don't empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.
Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
"Mobile skills" are likely still lower skill. Tablets and phones are mostly content consumption devices instead of content creation (photos/videos excluded). Does anyone do serious software development on a phone? How often are mobile users writing papers or prose using only their touchscreen? How many people are doing complicated video edit on an iPhone? Can those tasks be done on a table/phone? Sure, but I don't think its common.
The reason this is a problem is that it means there is a barrier between deeper computer skills and the devices/environment that people are using daily. The reason many of us became computer savvy on a desktop wasn't because we wanted to, its because we had to to get the game running we wanted or we had to write the paper we were required to. So being familiar with other uses on a computer, it is only a very mild extension to writing a script if the need arises. The only "new" or "foreign" part is the script, not the environment or interaction of where you're creating it.
With a tablet/phone as your primary device it means learning not just scripting, but learning all the skills necessary to use a computer. Its a high barrier.
However with their examples you don't need to write a script, you can solve them that way but you really don't need to for these examples. This is some basic search refinement skills (Outlook would even help you build this unlike say a Google search with refinement filters) and either a small spreadsheet or a calculator app to max out at their level 3.
Scripting this I would put at a level 4, but I would be interested where the authors of the paper would fit that in as its their research and what sort of percentage would fit into that skill set.
I always wonder how it's even possible. I can't do half shit that I do on my computer on my phone. And even if I can, I need to spend like 3x-4x more time because how inefficient touch screen is.
Recently lived like that for a while - until a laptop replacement part arrived. And now I am skeptical. I refuse to believe someone would go mobile-only willingly and long-time. Maybe if they cannot afford a computer, at max.
I am primarily mobile only, but I am also a Linux user on desktop. I just don't use the desktop very often because it's less convenient to have to sit down in front of a desktop or laptop versus just pulling out your phone and checking something. It's more a, it's the device I have and it's always on and I don't have to go anywhere to get it. As I said though, I'm high in both mobile and desktop because I run Linux and know how to use the command line and I flash custom ROMs on my phone and use primarily open source software. I also submit bugs to many open source, desktop, and mobile applications.
I doubt that. Phones hide even more of the internal infrastructure than PCs do.
What do you think all those "hacker" scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?
Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.
Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.
Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.
We still have more and less powerful people in our world.
What I mean is that I don't think it's a coincidence that "user-friendly" computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.
I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email
The screenshot thing is PAINFUL and way too common by management in particular
When I read "never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse" my first thought was "wow, they only ever used punched cards" until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.
I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy -- as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother's grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It's insane.
Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.
Born in that time frame. Windows XP was just finicky as hell, no matter how much praise it got later. If you wanted your Internet to work you just had to flush the DNS cache or just disable and re-enable the interface occasionally. Hell, same for my mouse - occasionally had to use the keyboard to disable and re-enable the mouse drivers.
Now shit just works. Only reason I've had to fiddle around so much in recent years is that I used Gentoo for a couple of years. Though by the time I was bored with it, it worked better than Windows XP ever did.
we had typing class in elementary school circa 1995. that's how I got to typing 150 wpm. almost useless now because of OCR, but still.. sad to see computer skills lost these days.
I see ppl typing with 3 fingers and you have 10 of them
I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.
For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.
In my experience, it's not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.
I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there's any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says "The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it." and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us "I'm too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you're still young." She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I've seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No "Hey, let's just see what it says," just straight to deciding it's impossible, so they don't even bother to check what's going on.
My father-in-law got a Master's Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he's now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.
I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can't even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).
Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.
<sigh>
I think it's a mix of all of these things.
Being able to read isn't quite equivalent to reading comprehension though. So between that, and lack of curiosity, laziness, defeatism, and more; it really does stunt the population when it comes to computer knowledge.
It's the retarded UIs, I think. I function the same way when having to use Windows, Android, typical applications and sites. It's an undertaking to use any of them to some end.
Now why do these people give up and offload it to us "sufficiently young" - they think these UIs are retarded for them, but work for us. Like "you wanted such things, you help me with them".
And they can't accept that such things are aimed at them and not us.
Yeah the biggest problem for people who can't use a computer always seems to be that they just won't ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything
There's an XKCD for that, of course.
Single handedly that is how I have acquired any of the computer knowledge I have. So it is absolutely mind blowing that people just can't seem to grasp the fact that most of the time what it takes to understand something, is reading. That being said, beyond that, breaking through to new discoveries; it makes me appreciate those with an inquisitive mind that tend to push the envelope beyond what is well understood and well documented.
Dude, you're on Lemmy. That means you're probably in the top 1% of people with computer skills.
I appreciate the compliment. However, there are plenty of people who are more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to the grand topic of computers and technology.
Yeah, probably a big sample bias in these comments
I've done support for sysadmins for almost a decade, and the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with are the ones who can't or won't read the error message and think a little about it. And my kids' friends all have the same problem: They don't read what's on screen and if they do they make no attempt to understand it.
This is why the humanities are important. All those times you have to explain why the curtains are blue is practice for reading other things and determining meaning.
I have found in my years of experience in IT, the best way I can handle an issue/error that a user may face is to work through it with them, verbally tell them what I am doing to fix it while showing them. Another trick from my repertoire is to try to relate to their frustration, or their problem, so they don't feel talked down to.
You are right, the humanities are important.
And it can be about how things are framed and communicated.
Same shit here. Now I know I have ADHD, back then I didn't. I just couldn't concentrate on any complete task. And still one day I started my Gentoo install and completed it simply by reading the handbook and the error messages etc. Ended up using Slackware after that, via reading too.
It's mind-boggling that people who can concentrate on reading pages and pages of text with their content won't read what's put under their nose.
From the article it does seem that the failure of ability isn't strictly related to computers per SE, but to an over all inability to think about the word problems given in an abstract and mathematically coherent way. They seemed to ask participants to solve what are essentially database query, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and logic problems in the context of an email suite. Word problems can be hard for anyone that hasn't studied and practiced how to decipher them. It's just that using a computer kind of forces one to confront those gaps in what should be a fundamental part of highschool education. Math and science classes aren't just solving problems by wrote memorization or memorizing the periodic table, they are about problem solving. Lots of people fall through the gaps and don't get that one special teacher who understood this.
I would agree with you here. From my experience, schooling doesn't aim to teach critical thinking, or reading comprehension ad much as it should. The way tests and work are handled is more closely inline with memorization. Memorization doesn't help people break new ground, or help develop the tools to begin troubleshooting, and tackling new ideas and problems.
Memorization typically ally only helps with solving problems we already have answers to.
That reminds me: i once searching for jobs in the usual local aggregators, it didn't have a link to the original offer nowhere, so i used developer console's picker to figure the URL out. My mother: did you just hack the job page?
Computers are magic and we are wizards because we understand more or less how it works.
I teach math to undergrads, and damn it's sad. They don't know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop, and upload it to Canvas. One guy ended up emailing it to me. They don't even know what a folder/directory is.
Well, in his defense, I could save a file from 8 different applications and they end up in 8 different locations on my phone file system. You would think they would all go to Documents or Downloads...nope. apps dont let you pick locations, and if they do, you don't get to pick anywhere you want
Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.
I mostly agree with you. But it only works because users give in. They deserve some of the blame.
They don't know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop
With USB cable? Because outside of that it gets complicated and/or vendor-specific quickly.
With usb cable most of people doesn’t even know where to start. They have no idea of where the document is saved. Plugging the phone to the computer doesn’t show a “recent files” list but the whole directory hierarchy. Maybe they even used some proprietary note taking app that doesn’t create a file and they don’t realize that
Bluetooth file sharing has worked for me on every device I own. Not sure if it works on Apple devices, but it probably does.
Honestly I use discord or email for that >.>
Windows/iPhone doesn’t seem to have a great solution as far as I’ve checked.
Why would they need to know what a folder/directory is? It’s a remnant from meat space and was replaced by tagging and is being replaced by LLM search/AI.
Why wouldn’t they be able to upload it directly to canvas?
I really empathize with people that didn’t have to figure out how to rip a CD at 2x speed or take a class on card catalog systems. They skipped a lot of critical problem solving learning opportunities.
As frustrating as this may be, it's even more frustrating when I see exactly the same thing among PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
directory structure and basic text editing are foreign concepts to them. If it's not in their IDE, they really don't understand it.
Also, 90% of them are hunt-and-peck two finger typists.
I typed hunt and peck for so long that I can hunt and peck with my eyes closed. Though technically I'm not hunting anymore, just pecking lol.
I started noticing this 10 years ago. To me, this isn't some new phenomenon. However, it feels even worse now than it did back then.
The number one thing that makes me go JackieChanWTF.jpg is when people don't even know how to navigate through directories.
I post this a lot but it’s true. Younger people definitely have problems with this.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
My aunt is a teacher and I remember when she started talking about how her school was getting Chromebooks I thought that wasn’t going to be good for learning how to use “real” computers. Same with phones and tablets. Everything is too abstracted away from the user so they never have to know what a directory is.
Google is buying the generation Apple is close to and Microsoft more or less failed to catch.
It's like a vicious cycle:
- People are tech illiterate
- Tech companies design things for the lowest common denominator.
- People don't need to learn anything new and become even more tech illiterate
AI is going to make it so much worse. You'll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone.
You mean the twenty to thirty somethings that have come along. They have one folder with all their stuff in it and sometimes spend quite some time just looking for a file because they are unwilling to organize it or even sort it by file type.
I use Arch btw. You should try Arch. Everyone in this post should stop what they're doing and try Arch. I never go outside.
I need to try Arch sometime... My son says great things about it, If I ever feel like Debian can't do something I'll give it a try.
It has always been this way. Part of my "age-driven degradation" is that I can see the same patterns repeating themselves often at odds with the age of the people in question. The average competency age always shift younger as any skilled profession does. I however am constantly having to show people that should have a newer skillset than me basic problem solving skills and somehow we can both read the same documentation and they not see the solution.
There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don't understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like "make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it" is a foreign concept.
I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I'm also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I'm comfortable with. I don't tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It's hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.
I have a large chunk of my colleagues who have little to no experience using CLI tools, and totally have found the last part to be true. In fairness, documentation is all over the place quality wise (I generally find Microsoft's useful but I've totally had issues in the past with undocumented or vaguely documented features/dependencies). People will google their issues, and increasingly I've found it doesnt point you at the documentation directly, instead stack overflow or medium pages.
I feel like there's definitely some conceptual... Stuff for lack of a better word that's an issue, I've seen a number of people focus on the execution instead of trying to understand what's the issue and define it logically, when pressed they struggle to explain.
From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring 'Computer Skills' as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.
I’ve been reading the book “A Small Matter of Programming” which discusses a bit end users relationships with computers.
I think people who are into computers get surprised to know most people just don’t care about how computers work and they shouldn’t have to. They want software that is easy to use and allows them to complete their task. Ex: a spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful software that hides anything about how computers work but still allow users to create multiple different “apps” by effectively programming.
This is one reason Apple is so successful and a lot of tech users don’t understand it. Apple creates “abstractions” so that end users don’t have to deal with low level details — something they don’t want to. They want to see the machine as a black box that just provides them some service easily and smoothly.
Most of the “decaying” tech skills people say are actually stuff people don’t need to know nowadays. Everything is an abstraction anyway, and most people tinkering with desktop computers aren’t aware of how the graphics software is rendering the screen, for example.
A lot of the decaying skills are things like understanding your computer's file system (i.e. how folders and files work, where they are, etc.) This kind of skill is definitely still needed if you work in an office environment. It may not be necessary if all you're doing is being spoon-fed Instagram posts on your phone, but understanding where you saved your files is pretty damn important for most office workers' day to day jobs (especially with how dogshit Windows' search functionality is).
The problem is the software isn't making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.
It's not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it's removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.
The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.
For example, if you don't know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won't). That's bad for users and for the industry overall.
Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.
Hahaha, no way that it could be even worse than what I think. I think almost everyone is an idiot.
No, it definitely is worse than you think, no matter how bad you think it is.
That's because it's continually getting worse.
It can't get worse than assuming everyone can hardly do the most basic shit.
I guess Idiocracy was a documentary after all.
I've watched it (EDIT: recently) and frankly it seemed like a future where people stupid, but like me are the majority.
IRL people both stupid and the opposite of me are the majority. That sucks more.
Lot's of software is just shit/hard to use
In my experience, it's often users who just want everything spoon fed to them like infants that think it's hard.
If one's made one's software well, the easiest UI to make is one that's easy to use
That is the reason for degrading proficiency. Not, that the tools are bad but the attitude, they have to be easy to use.
That almost everything "just works" is nice as a consumer but it won't make you troubleshoot and you will not gain technical expertise by using such devices.
If I'm buying a bus ticket, i shouldn't have to troubleshoot imo
I wonder why user tests aren't even mentioned once in the article. If you design an interface you have to test it with your audience