My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
I don’t think so. I do think there will be a decline as we get older, but the overall level of aptitude will be higher than the generations before and after. It’s the younger generations I’m worried about. Other commenters have already mentioned it, they’ve grown up with already well-polished UX to the point that they don’t need to understand how a device works to use it. Most of us here have a high level understanding of how computers work, the app or browser you’re reading this from, because we had to understand how they worked if we wanted to be able to use them when we were younger.
When you say high level, could you expand on that? I’m curious where I fall on the scale of understanding
Yeah of course. I mean concepts as simple as a file structure. That’s a big one that a lot of kids today don’t understand. The idea of a hierarchy of folders to store files is alien. You can read more about it here
From there I would say that if you understand that your browser communicates with specific servers to request and receive web pages and content you’d be ahead of curve. For most people “you need Wi-Fi to use chrome” is an adequate explanation.
If you ask me, a lot of this core understanding is missing for younger generations because computers have become too intuitive for the user to need to understand what’s going on underneath. ~20 years ago, back in the Windows XP days computers were fairly ubiquitous but UX was only starting to mature into what it is today. So you needed to learn if you wanted to do anything beyond open a program from the start menu.
I’ll say that I’m speaking from personal experience and the experience of people around me, if yours are different to mine that’s cool 😃