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)

I used to work for a small language department at a major university, as a combination office administrator, IT guy, and "whatever needs to get done" person. the faculty was full of internationally-renowned authors and researchers and experts, and nearly all of them were absolutely terrible at dealing with their technology. and this was in the mid-2000s, so this was even before smartphones and tablets became dominant

the problem was that they couldn't view their computers (and related tech) as systems with behaviors; everything was a separate, arbitrary piece that didn't connect to anything else. this is related to a longer post I made a while back about people who can't model complex systems in their heads, but even the linguists who demonstrably could model complex systems, because they did it every day for their research, they couldn't do it with their technology because they didn't have a foundation to start with, and nobody teaches people how to use computers that way

one of the senior faculty was a language pedagogist and we talked about this sort of thing quite a bit, how computer docs tend to either be "X For Dummies" books that focus on individual tasks, or technical documentation that assumes a minimal level of understanding already, and very little in between

this plus the other decades worth of tech support and related work has led me to have a project on the back burner since basically forever: a book targeted at "smart people who are not computer people". a book about understanding concepts, not about how to do specific tasks. about building models in your head about how a computer works, even very simple models, to give people that foundation to build on

there would be four core aspects to the book:

1. giving the reader a foundation for building a mental model on, specifically the idea that computers receive, store, share, and modify information, and that everything a computer does is one of these things. and on top of that, the instructions that a computer follows are also information, and can be shared, modified, etc the same way that, say, a picture of a cat can be

2. explaining the origins of computer terminology because they are incredibly useful for building that foundation. what does the word "interface" actually mean, for example, and why does it mean the same thing in both the terms "user interface" and "Digital Video Interface" (aka DVI)? because an interface is the location where two things overlap and interact, a word that predates its use in computer technology; a DVI port is where the computer interfaces with the display, and the UI is where the computer interfaces with a human being

3. explaining the concept of "states", in the sense that computers (and phones and tablets and whatnots) will shift between modes of operation, either on their own or when told to by a user, and that these modes can overlap and interact. not knowing what state or mode your device or application is in will lead to confusion and frustration, and not understanding what states are in the first place will just lead to complete chaos

4. a rundown of basic concepts that are present on most technological systems, but often in very different ways and often using different terminology. "folders" and "directories" are really the same thing, for example, and "bookmarks", "shortcuts", and "favorites" are usually referring to the same concept, although what they're pointing at varies wildly. instead of explaining how to use the Mac OS Finder or Windows Explorer, explain the idea and what the common functionality is

this book has not happened because A) I'm deeply disabled, B) taking care of basic shit for my partner and I under capitalism has taken up all my spoons, and C) the odds of anybody reading such a book are incredibly slim, but watching the influx of "easier" devices like phones and tablets just make the problem worse keeps making me feel like I should somehow find the time and energy

Before I get into it, some thoughts on the OP and linked article

Sorry, the first part of this reply is going to be talking about this!

I don't like this article. I think the OECD study it references¹ at least gives us some interesting numbers. I think the tone of this article is dismissive and hostile to less-skilled users.

It insults their intelligence and has that general air of superiority that technically inclined writers frequently bring to discussions about non-technical users.

For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.

"You will have a higher IQ than your users" -- fuck off!

The article frequently takes a snide tone, talking down to less technical users and panders to the egos of more technical users

"Even the supposedly difficult tasks don’t sound that hard and I certainly expect all of my readers to be able to perform them..."

Being too polite to use a term like “level zero,” the OECD researchers refer to the lowest skill level as “below level 1.”

"which is sorted in ascending order by the number of people at the highest skill level — i.e., people like yourself"

I also take issue with the position the copost thread takes, that "phones are dumbing down the user base" which I will address in a second.

Overall though, the linked article does seem to take the position that as technologists, in spaces where we are designing for people outside of our fields, it is our role to accommodate and empower all users, and I can at least get behind that.

I don't buy that phones are "dumbing down" the user base

The first iPhones, arguably the product that defined the aesthetics, design and UX of the modern smartphone era, only appeared in 2007. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this was the start of the tipping point that got app-based pocket computers into the hands of the general public.

I obviously cannot demonstrably prove this, but prior to this, I have a deep, deep suspicion that if you were interacting with computer users, you had a deeply biased, self-selecting population, because you were dealing with the sort of person with enough of an interest or need to learn how to computer. The people who didn't, were just not on your forums and webbed sites and chats.

I think there's an argument to be made (possibly backed by demographics I don't have) that the rise of smartphones and correlated invitation for non-computer-touchers to participate in online culture has simply invited people outside of this self-selected skillset to become more visible online?

Certainly maybe people raised on phones as a primary device from a young age may be more familiar with a search-first file UX than navigating a hierarchical filesystem, but I think "the kids don't know what a file is?!" is maybe almost a clickbaity overstatement.

But even if it is true, at least in some case, I reject the notion that the hierarchical filesystem, a concept that is likely over half a century old now, is the end-all and be-all of perfect and ideal information representation. It has certainly been, and continues to be, a very strong and useful one. But I don't think we should hold a religious reverence and adherence to this tradition in a way that prevents new, better, more intuitive models from flourishing when and if they truly take root.

Systems vs Tasks

So a cool friend rightly summarized this problem as one of systems vs. tasks.

Many, many people, do not use desktop computers as general purpose computing devices that they understand top to bottom as systems they can apply to any class of problems. Many of them learn one program, or small suite of programs on their desktop as a specific skill to accomplish a specific job or task, and their knowledge ends there. And this is not a necessarily a problem.

I will give the example of my mother, who worked something approximately like a combination accountant + front desk role at a small business. She could do a few things with computers because she had been trained to do those specific things with computers, and she could do them quite well:

• operate accounting software (this requires domain specific knowledge that I don't have! Even if I can navigate the interface using general systems knowledge, I cannot perform this task!)
• send and receive emails
• author documents in an office suite

If presented with the computer doing some behaviour outside of the norm (eg. an error or something she had not seen before), she would usually either just restart the system or ask for help. All of this is reasonable for someone with a task-oriented rather than systems-oriented knowledge of computers.

She was in no way unintelligent, lazy, "low IQ" or anything like that - she would extremely readily pick up new skills when someone took the time to teach her. At one point, we digitized all the paperwork she had previously been photocopying and filling in via typewriter, so they could be filled in an office program and emailed directly. While this is something she never would have thought to do herself because as a task-oriented user, she is not primed to think of computing as a general purpose resource that can solve problems in new ways, it was not difficult at all to teach her to do this new task.

I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who uses a computers desires or even needs a systems-type understanding of that computer.

A Failure of Education?

I really like the notion in this post of a book, tailored to people who want to start to understand these horrible machines from a systems standpoint and allow them to model broad, general concepts, that isn't targeted at people who either already know most of these things, and doesn't talk down to the reader or come at them from the point of a zero-experience beginner.

Along those lines, I do wonder if we have to reconsider how we approach education re: general computer use, though.

First a disclaimer: it's been a long time since I was in grade school or high school. Like, a really long time. Like, for most of my school career, we either had C=64 computers or were operating in a DOS environment. Maybe it's changed? I wouldn't know.

That said, my computer education experience through school was some combination of the following:

• using computers to teach another concept within a captive environment (eg. math edutainment)
• general mechanical skills such as typing
• programming

You, dear reader, may note that there is an enormous gap here between "learning to press keys on a keyboard really fast" and "learning to program" which, I think, leaves a lot of potential learning material unrealized.

I would suggest that most people do not need to learn to program. Most people probably should not feel like they need to learn to program in order to be more productive and take advantage of the ability of general purpose computing to empower them to solve self-defined problems².

I likewise strongly disbelieve that everyone has to learn to be A Systems Person™, but in a society (at least, the one I live in) where critical resources such as utilities, branches of government, etc. are increasingly connected and primarily accessible through online services and broadly, methods mediated by computers, there is a lot of room for general purpose education, general skills education, and broadly basic literacy for people who are not personally interested in becoming professional computer-touchers.

(There is also the issue of the economic and demographic digital divide to bridge, but we can't solve everything with one stroke of the same brush, and I feel like that is both outside of the scope of this section, and beyond my ability to meaningfully opine on)

And this kind of thing is why I get excited to hear people talking about a book for "Smart people who are not computer people," because I want to see this learning gap filled. I want regular, everyday, non-technical, not-systems-people users to be empowered, to the greatest extent possible, to take advantage of these tools to solve their own problems without having to make their entire life about understanding these systems.

Or at the very least, to have a baseline level of understanding where they don't feel completely helpless when a computer misbehaves or does something unexpected, or they are asked to do something outside of a task they have specifically been trained to do.

1. i'm basing this off the good faith belief that the article interprets the study well and the numbers it transcribes are good, i have not had time to read 150 pages of dense material

2. nerds love to make fun of it, but i think the creative and sometimes cursed way people use spreadsheets as a general purpose computing tool is an incredible example of this and a testament to how you do not need to know programming in the traditional sense^2.1 to solve these kinds of self-directed problems

   1. although i would argue that sufficiently advanced use of a spreadsheet is a completely valid and even reasonably accessible form of programming