New-Time Tech Literacy—Examples?

[pb4uski]

A couple examples.

A friend of mine got back to his seasonal rental and said was having trouble with his cable... was about to call the landlord.... there are two buttons at the top of the remote.... a TV input button and and a power button... he was pressing the wrong button... I pressed the power button and "magically" fixed his cable problem.

My great aunt was visiting my aunt and used the bathroom. She came out of the bathroom all flustered that she couldn't figure out how to turn off the overhead light.... it was a solar tube light!

 

[Music Lover]

A few years ago I went for lunch with a work friend. He had owned his car for 5 or 6 years and was complaining about the fan speed. It had push buttons for "low" and "high". Low was too low and the windows fogged up and on high it sounded like a jet engine. I pushed the low and high buttons at the same time and they both lit up and provided a perfect "medium" speed.

 

[REWahoo]

When I was a kid one of my best friends dad was a pulpwood hauler in the backwoods of East Texas. He told me his dad had finally scrimped and saved enough money to buy himself a chainsaw but came home after the first day using it completely exhausted and complaining the saw was a total waste of money. Knowing his dad was technology challenged, he offered to take a look at the saw to be sure it was working OK.

My friend walked out to his dad's truck, gave the rope on the saw a pull and it started right up. His dad yelled, "What's that noise?"

 

[Souschef]

When we graduated screaming and kicking from our flip phones to Alcatel smartphones,. I downloaded the manual. I bought us each the identical phone to shorten the learning process.
I did have to read the manual to learn to swipe to answer. My DW was upset by the geolocation function. She would get a message asking her if she liked shopping at a store she just went to. I disabled hers, but left mine on so I could call Lyft or Uber..
When she went from her 1998 Cadillac to a 2017 Mazda it was a real learning process for her. At least there was a manual the size of a phone book.

I paired the Bluetooth in the car with her phone so she could listen to Pandora. She went into the manual to set up the cruise control so it would slow if we caught up to a slower vehicle.
The other thing we did with Bluetooth was to pair her Kindle with our Bose soundbar so we could listen to Pandora in the house.

 

[imoldernu]

Use self checkout at Walmart?

 

[kcowan]

Intuitive - pure BS - laziness on the part of the designer to write up the manual and/or do proper user testing.....they use their customers as beta testers. Iconization is not standard - there are exceptions. And many times some basic configuration settings are buried in sub-menus or there is an assumption you will fiddle around to find it. I find that type of thinking on the part of designers arrogant. If I see that and they don't give me a manual or some sort of resource to tell me how to work their product, I don't buy it.

I worked in a large healthcare organization and we tried to standardize on our technology platform for all patient monitoring. We didn't want the clinicians to get lost trying to find out how to manage the settings. We trained them and then re-trained every year. Each vendor had a different way adjust the settings - one through menus, another a 'trim knob.' We also had a standard configuration built for us---*and* there were manuals available.....so one type of interface was what we had so the clinicians could focus on delivering healthcare and not fighting the technology.

I nearly broke a vendor's device once in their 'showroom' showing them how a clinician could screw up the controls by just spinning the knobs around an inadvertently pushing the buttons - the product managers freaked out, but the point was made. People can and will find ways to screw up a device and if you don't account for that in proper user testing, you might end up on the bad end of a lawsuit depending on what the device in question is designed to do.

Back in the day before tech gadgets, I had the job of designing the operator interface for a refinery. Their engineering director would perform product testing by punching random buttons with a rubber pencil stick. Finally I set up a little routine that detected rapid button pressing and displayed "Thanks Frank, have a nice day!" and our console was accepted as superior in human factors.

(They insisted on not resetting the Suppress all alarms button after 10 minutes. That decision ended up costing them $1.5 million! Hey the customer is always right, after all it is their money!)

 

[kcowan]

I was impressed when push button radios all seemed to converge on the same standard for setting the buttons, although it got complicated when there were 2 and 3 sets of them!

But I lamented that they never had an agreed process for changing the time! Let's have standard time all year long.