SlimeyJade

It's me, your favorite slimecat!

Slimey catgirl VTuber!


eramdam
@eramdam

every so often i think "surely people aren't that bad with tech" and then i get reminded that mentioning a specific account to take a screenshot of a tweet is a thing people do on Twitter and it drives me insane.

i know tech is probably not obvious if you're not a nerd but come on man. i feel like i'm becoming a boomer nerd (nerd boomer?) in real-time.


Osmose
@Osmose

I'm paraphrasing something told to me like 8 years ago so don't quote me on this but it was sometime around when we started working on the in-browser screenshot tool, and they did a bunch of qualitative interviews and surveys and found that it's actually fairly common for users to:

  • Not know that their computer can take a screenshot or even what a screenshot is.
  • Know that they can print a webpage.
  • Know that they can scan things and get an image of them.
  • Know that they can email files and download the attachments on another computer.
  • When faced with a problem that requires getting a screenshot of a webpage, instead of thinking "is this something that can be done easily / should I search how to do this", they will instead combine the things they already know how to do to accomplish the goal, e.g. print the webpage out, scan it back in to a different computer that the scanner is hooked up to, and email the scanned document to themselves so they can retrieve it on the original computer.

I wish I could remember the more surprising examples, but the point was that, at least based on what that particular study saw, the average user is far more ingenious than you'd think, but they lack a large body of knowledge to apply that ingenuity to. And if they can come up with a way to do a task using what they know already, they're more likely not to consider looking up if there's an easier way since they already consider it solved.

I don't remember how I learned about taking screenshots but the first way I learned was the PrintScreen key. And once I knew that, it was how I always took screenshots until I was lucky enough to witness someone using Cmd+Shift+4 on MacOS and asked what they had just done; otherwise I had no reason to look up if there was a better way.

Hearing this shifted my thinking on what users are capable of to view it less as a competence issue and more of a knowledge issue.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @eramdam's post:

in reply to @Osmose's post:

More than 3 decades ago I learned how to save images by screenshotting the desktop. The screen resolution was small so it took at least 2 screenshots to get the whole image. This was in the days of dialup and BBS's and image archives hosted in folders on someone's computer. I took screenshots, pasted those into image software, saved them as whatever format i was using at the time, copied all those pieces to 2.5" floppies to take to a computer without a modem, copy pasted the art portion in image editing software, and cropped them in such a way as to be able to put the pieces together pixel perfect by hand. Cut/copy and paste. Whatever software I used let me move a selection a pixel at a time using the arrow keys. I don't think I knew that one from the start.

Wild time. I had incredibly limited instruction on computer usage. I taught myself through trial and error and just poking around and using whatever built in help system there was. I didn't know how to do all that above any other way for probably a couple years. I had to unlearn many things over the years but many fragments of my experience are still useful. Now I can right click or save page as or use addons or find a browsers temp folder, etc to get my funny animals. I'll dig as deep as I need to to get at the files I need.