SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
Me: You mean the desktop?
Mom: I don't know. The way it was.
Me: Is it this? (shows her the desktop)
Mom: No. It was all black.
Me: You mean off? (shuts computer down)
Mom: Yes. Thank you.
My Mom's a preschool teacher, and I will rely heavily on her wisdom when I have kids, seeing as I don't know jack about 3 year olds.
Me in 7 years: Mom, my kid won't eat his dinner. I think I got a broken one.
We all have our own useful areas of knowledge.
I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)
And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...).
The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe me that no matter what she did, she couldn't possibly harm the computer beyond my ability to repair it. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with computers think that it is very easy to irreparably damage them. It kind of discourages taking risks and trying to solve problems on your own. Once I made it clear that she could (and should) do whatever she wanted without fear, she picked it up extremely rapidly.
We (younger people) have an advantage in that we're used to pretty much everything being software driven, so we know that if we screw up our computer, phone or DVD player we can just pull the plug or the battery. We're also used to the idea that not every device will behave the same way to achieve the same function. We press "send" to "send" a call, but not to send an SMS message, even though the latter is standard usage and the former is not, but we don't care because we know that's how the UI works. And, we know that we'll have to keep learning new UIs as we get older. Older people don't have a problem dialing nine for an outside line, even though at home they just pick up the receiver, because they probably learned it in their 20s.
We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.
Tech interfaces are usable -- they're just not intuitive to those who didn't grow up using computers. Ironically, part of the problem is that the metaphors and shortcuts that some interfaces use in an attempt to make things easier end up make things more confusing:
- Operating systems: "Why is the trashcan on my desktop?"
- Macs: "If I want to eject the CD, I'm supposed to throw it away in the trashcan?"
- Cell phones: "So you're saying I have to hold down the off button if I want to turn the phone on?"
So yeah, we do have a long, long way to go.
Cellphones on the other hand are one of the most widely distributed electronic devices in the world, and they're clearly designed for anyone to use. It's certainly the designer's prerogative to assume the user will have a certain level of training and familiarity with it (or will take the time to learn it), but my argument is that in some cases a designer who goes the extra mile and makes a truly intuitive device has the opportunity to capture a much larger user base.
You could say that's what blogger did -- there were many ways to build a blog before, but Evan Williams and co. made it much easier to launch and maintain one, and that paid off for them.
If you do this enough, you will inevitably come up against a real challenge. One of my students could not even double-click. She would raise her hand to hover a couple of inches above the mouse, then stab down with her finger twice. Not only was this too slow to register as a double click, she invariably moved the mouse. with each downward stab of her finger. I would show her the right way to do it, but she would always devolve to her old behavior.
Do you not perhaps think that correlation is not causation? Maybe "dropping out of the education system early" is in fact a more significant data point than being 40? I'm 32 and if things stay as they are, in 10 years I'll have real trouble changing jobs in this industry. The current crop of geeks are in for a nasty surprise if they think they'll be a hot commodity forever.
It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion.
I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.