Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.

FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.

Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.

There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus.

But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?

> As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about.

More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread.

Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.