This study by Nielsen Nelson literally changed how I see the world when it came out.
From its own summary: "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."
When you read what they consider medium-complexity tasks, you will probably head desk. But this is the computer skill level of the general population. When you make applications, you have to consider these are your users, and you need to accommodate them. Which also leads me to why I feel this study needs a follow up. After around 10 years of improving UX since this study started we have seen a significant increase of usability, but I believe a lot of other computer skills have atrophied in its wake. In that time, we built out an infrastructure around simplifying computer use for the average person, and I believe we are now victims of our own success. What a lot of us consider basic computer skills has been seen as black magic by the general public for years.
At my alma mater, they are calling for the state to bring back typing classes because kids don't know how to use a file path, or sometimes they never learned how to type. PCGamer had a similar piece about this a couple years ago. Part of this is the shift to mobile and tablets, and it's not entirely a bad thing. In a lot of cases we have created expert photoshop users who don't know where their photos are saved to, and they frankly don't care. They are complacent in their walled garden app store and are comfortable. I just hope the search function doesn't get bugged on them one day, cause that will cause a lot of chaos for them.
Every day I encounter people who have only ever used their phone for everything you use a computer for and don't know how to use a mouse or keyboard and jab the monitor with their fingers. People who don't know the words upload or download. People who don't have an email. Or people who insist they do know how to use a computer and are very good at them and then ask me for help printing something from a page that has a giant blue PRINT button that actually downloads a virus.
I think a lot of tech savvy millennials take for granted that a lot of office jobs are seen as skilled labor because computer skills actually are really complicated skills that not just anyone knows how to do. You might think "all I'm doing is using MS Office to type shit up and make basic spreadsheets and manage emails" but like there's a lot of librarians with masters degrees who absolutely struggle with that stuff even after "15+ years of experience with MS Office"
Whether the work being done is necessary for the economy is another question but when it comes to salaries being set by supply and demand, the supply of people competent enough with computers to do these "basic easy things" is actually much smaller than you think. It just seems bigger because your own individual life is mediated by computers
This is extremely resonant. At both my current and previous job, I've had director-level employees ask me to do extremely basic things for them — like delete a slide from a PowerPoint presentation or edit text.
At my first office job out of college, way back in 2010, we realized that most of the salespeople did not know the basics of using a computer. So we created a short and extremely simple test to be used during the interview process, with questions like: "Which of these is an email address?" And let me tell you, the vast majority of applicants failed. (So much so, that they would usually just hire them anyway, lol.)
And like, no hate or anything. It's actually kind of impressive that people can function in an office setting without knowing a lot of this stuff. But it obviously is (and has been) a concerning trend as technology consumes more and more of our lives!
I guess a silver lining is that if you're savvy, you should realize that your own knowledge and skillset is more valuable than you may initially assume. I'm very glad I actually had typing and word processing classes in high school. (Bring 'em back!)
If you know the verbs "click" "copypaste" "drag and drop" "unzip" "upload" and "right click" then you are in a minority
In another life I was doing tech support for a small specialized software company. Its clients were mostly doctors with a private practice, sometimes their office admin people.
Most of the people that called the support line were over 50 years old, at least. All incredibly smart and accomplished and able to do difficult things, but not very familiar with computers in general.
I distinctly remember getting a call from this surgeon. Incredibly smart woman. She cut people open and put them back together as her fucking job, come on. She'd been running her own practice for decades. Clearly a skilled person. And she was having issues with her software. It was "broken", it "looked different" and she didn't know what to do.
So I ask her to describe what is different and she's having trouble being specific. She doesn't recognize anything on the screen. At this point I don't even know what part of the software she accessed by mistake. Maybe a settings page?
Eventually I ask her to tell me everything she sees on the screen, describe it as detailed as possible, top to bottom, right to left.
And she describes "a small apple, then it says "finder" and next to it it says..."
"ok, what's under the apple and those words"
"under that there's some colors and then a little rectangle thing and next to it a red dot and a yellow and green one, but there's more red dots under that..."
I realized she accidentally got the software window out of fullscreen. She didn't recognize that the desktop, the icons, the windows, etc were all different "layers" of things. Her screen was just a chaos of shapes and words and fragments unrelated to each other. I imagine it really looked "broken" to her.
(Very patiently I managed to guide her keystroke by keystroke to launch the screensharing app we used for tech support and once I could take over her screen I showed her what was going on. It took a while, but she wanted to learn and she got it)
In an ideal world, no one would need to know what an email address, or a URL, or a phone number is. They're each quintessential examples of internal implementation details leaking. The trouble is, we haven't replaced them with abstractions, but with middlemen who take ownership over human communication. No one knows what an e-mail address is, they know how to message someone on Facebook or LinkedIn. No one knows what a URL is, they know they type shit in the omnibar and get what they want. No one knows where their files are or even that they have files, they go to the Google Photos app and there's all their photos.
It'd be great if these internal details went away because we made computers easier to use, but instead middlemen made their walled gardens easier to get stuck in.



