Something I’ve noticed as an elder millennial working in IT is that there’s an assumption by older generations that because zoomers have grown up with smartphones that they’ll be automatically be proficient with tech as a whole, but it’s not correct in my experience and I really think it’s doing them a disservice. They’re better than anyone else I’ve met at navigating apps/mobile UI and can be super efficient working that way but tend to struggle as much as boomers with more traditional computers, because it’s simply not what they grew up with and no one really sat them down to formally teach them.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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There is another article I read where colleges had to teach Computer Science majors basic computer concepts like folders because the students relied on search for everything.
It would be like how almost everyone knew how to work on their own car in the 40's and 50's because you needed to in order to get the car to run. Nowadays, you don't need that information to drive a car.
I think your car metaphor is even more apt than you meant it, as over time both car manufacturers and mobile platforms have gotten more and more hostile to users actually being able to do maintenance or self service.
That's true, but there's always a way. For instance clones of the John Deere factory service tool and pirated software is available on AliExpress for less than a thousand dollars. For more common manufacturers there's tools for doing all kinds of stuff.
The more popular the platform, the more prevalent the problem, and the more expensive the OEM makes it are all determining factors as to the availability of aftermarket tools and repairs.
If something costs a million people one thousand dollars to fix then a third party can afford a couple of full time engineers to come up with a fix that costs five hundred.
I've personally made my own physical tools for working on cars when a factory special tool is called for.
Never underestimate a determined person with a welder and a grinder.
For sure, but it does make the barrier to entry significantly higher. A kid now is much less likely to stumble into how something works if they have to effectively break several locks when before the door was wide open.
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It seems 1990-2010 was the golden age for picking computers up "on the fly".
Scanners are basically (and most of the time literally) printers. And printers are of the devil.
I'm not Gen Z btw, I'm on the tail end of Gen X and an IT professional of twenty years.
It's like they figured out printer firmware/GUI in 1981 and then have never touched it again. They're competing with the TI-83 in terms of longevity at this point.
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The scanner part is the only reason why I haven't smashed that damn printer yet... I hate printers so much, I'd rather almost pay for a print service that just ships the printed documents to me on the next day.
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Counter point: Nobody knows how to operate printers and scanners because they are not build by people that are tech literate.
Give a printer or scanner a proper UI using the design principles that modern apps use and see how easy newer generations pick things up
Almost right. Printers and scanners were not built by people. They are an independent life form that just happens to emulate office equipment for their own benefit. They have enabled parasitic entities such as Canon and HP to thrive alongside them, but since there is no ‘design’ involved, they will never really develop the same kind of interfaces we expect from modern UX labs.
It’s also the reason any sane person keeps a loaded gun nearby whenever interacting with them, just in case they make any unusual noises.
I am convinced that printer companies make their products as esoteric and intimidating to the average person as possible on purpose so that they can sell expensive servicing packages to businesses.
Id wager that they dont put too much money into R&D and just pay one guy to port over the same code from their last last last generation printer to the new one. Over time its become an unrecognizable mess that is just hacked into working and no one ever takes a look under the hood. Their main market is the ink anyways, so making the printer good at what it does is an afterthought
This. The core principle of intuitive UI is reusing ui elements that are familiar. That's the reason every elevator has buttons, and that's why you can intuitively operate every elevator you encounter.
The problem is that not everyone is familiar with the same things. Many people of older generations (those that have stopped keeping up with technology) are used to buttons, that's why a blue text doesn't immediately mean clickable to them.
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Hardly a Gen-z specific issue. Office printer/scanners have always been confusing.
as a old timer I feel that it's not that "complex" if you are allowed to experiment without someone looking at you with disappointment. Like there was one time I was trying to figure out how to do double side copying on a machine I never used before, the HR come by and just say you do this print one side and then shuffle the paper into the feeder to print the other side. I tell her that the machine can do double side copying/scanning cause it's similar tray layout I saw in prior company. She let me do my experiment and I figure out how to set the modes and it works as intended. This saved her lots of time having to stick with the machine where she could've just spend sometime to figure out as well. People's pride usually gets in their way of learning.
side note: stick fresh printed paper back into printing machine can easily cause paper jam. That's on top of the risk where you printed with wrong orientation/side if you didn't follow the marking direction properly.
lastly, it's paperless era, please encourage the folks that needs to do the papers to use docusign or something to accomplish the same task. we really don't need to waste all those paper printing information that's only needed for a 30mins meeting. when we can all see it on say, google doc.(or whatever sharing platform. )
Yeah, I'm not Gen Z and I've always found office printers unnecessarily complicated. Like, I've barely learned how to use a fax machine, do you have to make it even more confusing?
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Honestly I expect, just like in the early days of personal computing, that Gen Z and beyond will suffer from PC illiteracy. The main issue is that phones and tablets are being used almost exclusively during school and on personal time, so they have no idea what Windows nor even Mac looks and feels like. What happens with Zoomer gets an office job for the first time? They have to figure out how to use Windows and Office for the first time. It's crazy to think that your 70 yr old Grandma and your 17 yr old Nephew could potentially be on the same level of knowledge of how to use Windows, Office, etc...
It's insane how true this is. I've actually worked with some kids that have no idea how to use windows, let alone know how to type. It's so odd, and almost disorienting at times, to experience this from both those older than me (parents, etc) and those younger than me.
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There's plenty of zoomers out there with office jobs already and the world hasn't collapsed. They'll learn just like the generations before them learned.
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This is a real issue, but scanners are the worst example because no generation can figure them out.
This is something we see with our students at school. I think we do them a disservice assuming they have skills we had to acquire as technology progressed. Even something as fundamental as typing is not being actively taught.
You took the words out of my mouth! I am grading reports and one of the students had to resubmit because they were missing page numbers.
It was resubmitted in time and...well, they technically got those page numbers on there. By manually adding them on each page. No, not in the footer; by just adding some line breaks and typing a number.
Another had the same issue and apparently printed their report and added numbers by hand and then took pictures with their phone and submitted their report as 25 .png files.
It's all good though. They're business students who go on to work with some of the biggest companies and have starting salaries over €50k minimum.
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I never read the manual to learn how to use one. Just trial and errored it.
We sure this isn't a consequence of our intolerance for "failure" conditioning a generation to just stick to what they know instead of experimenting?
A whole generation has been raised with tech that just works and if on the rare occasion it goes wrong, it goes very wrong and either needs IT/Customer Service/etc to fix it for you because the problem is very technical, or it's just broken and you get a new one. This means they have no problem-solving skills because none of the problems they've faced were solvable, and they're scared to get it wrong because getting it wrong breaks things in ways that are bad and expensive. Coming into an environment where trial and error is now not just ok, but expected, is a reversal of some deeply ingrained habits for them. That doesn't mean they can't learn, but it does make it a bit of a culture shock for them.
More than just works, modern apps and phones are explicitly not designed to be fixed by the end user. Why would they have those skills when iPhones and iPads are anti-repair? When software is lucky to have 3 different settings?
I personally blame apple for a lot of the tech illiteracy in the younger generations.
This is why Right To Repair is a big deal. Not just because it reduces waste by fixing what might have been thrown away, not just because it allows you to do what you want with the device that you supposedly own, and not just because it breaks the monopoly and requires pricing of repair services to actually be competitive - although all those things are important. It's also because if a device can be repaired, some people will be encouraged to learn how to repair it, and in doing so they'll learn a valuable problem-solving mindset. We need to be mindful of how we first introduce young people to technology to avoid this learned helplessness and instil the attitudes that will allow them to function when they're adults and it's now their job to look under the hood and make it all work.
And to add, making problems unsolvable often means another purchase for that manufacturer so there is big incentive to get especially younger people used to that.
Maybe the main problem is that they don't have the concept of trial and error. Yeah sure a printer has weird UX, but just press buttons and see what happens 😁.
To be fair, printers are full of ghosts and demons. Even if you get to know how a printer works for years it'll still randomly just do some crazy shit you weren't expecting.
People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button
When I was in my early teens I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 7 from my granddad and spent so much time on tutorial websites and Worth1000, messing around with the tools and making fake digital post-its and stuff like that. I think Photoshop is definitely up there in terms of complex UIs, so having that hands-on experience was crucial in learning how to learn other UIs.
It also helped that a lot of the tutorials by that point were for CS3, which had warp features that 7 didn't have, and I had to experiment to find workarounds for the missing tools.
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To be fair to the screaming in the thumbnail, and zoomers in general, scanners and printers are generally universally awful lol
We can put a man on the moon, but you want to print text on a piece of paper? ERROR: PC LOAD LETTER
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It comes down to good interface engineering. There was a time engineers were really good at making complex systems simple to operate. Now it seems they're good at making simple systems complex to operate. It seems to coincide with most companies outsourcing design to cheap labor markets.
On another trend in interface engineering, I think a lot of "apps" are easy to use because they simply don't provide options. This is how you will use our software and that's all there is to it. The plus side is simplicity, the down side is inflexibility.
I'm pretty good at dealing with systems of all kinds myself. I get really infuriated at times by the lack of flexibility for the sake of simplicity in systems now. You can always read a manual, but you can't easily change programming or design.
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I’ve seen this with my Zoomer sister-in-law. She just recently learned how to use Microsoft - their home and school system was entirely Apple. She’s still not great at troubleshooting.
It's happening a lot, and I see a lot of boomers using the "haw haw kids stupid" behind it, but it's not them, it's the parents fault, and it's really sad honestly.
I learned typing in 6th grade, we had computer classes where we learned Microsoft and Mac, we learned how to do word and excel. A lot of that got me ready for office life.
Now parents and schools just expect that it's easy, but as we're seeing they may pick it up faster, but unless they have a need to learn it they won't. I feel empathy for these kids who are going to be entering the workforce who were failed.
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... huh?
Non-universal experience, but I'm a zoomer (24) and I'm basically my family's IT department, my apparent specialty being the wrangling of our unruly printer-scanner. My millennial older brother (who will be 28 this summer) never even thinks to ask google basic troubleshooting stuff when he has a problem. I think it's less about generation and more about individual inclination to read instructions and look through settings menus, that sort of thing.
Absolutely. I'm a Z (25), worked help desk for a little while. It's entirely more individual interest and inclination, generational divides don't necessarily make everyone suddenly tech wizards. It usually just means they don't struggle with their phone much and feel comfortable on the internet.
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Not surprising, and not entirely their fault. In my experience, software for operating a scanner or printer is almost invariably terrible. In the case of printers, this is intentional; printers are designed, first and foremost, to extract money from you.
For what it's worth, the Document Scanner app from the Gnome project (the Debian package for it is named simple-scan) is pretty good.
However…
Every morning when he turned it on, he would be greeted by a pop-up from the storage service Dropbox, which he always accepted without reading.
This is not acceptable. If there is a message on your screen, you are expected to read it, so read it. You don't have to re-read it if you see the same message again, but you do have to read it the first time you see it. No excuses. If you get messages that are annoying and unnecessary (note: that's an “and”, not an “or”), then you're using bad software; replace it with something better.
And yes, it's normal to have to replace software with better software. Sturgeon's law is in full force and effect here.
Younger people seem more willing to learn, and can quickly adapt to new skills
Absolutely. The older you get, the harder it is to learn new skills. That's why children are sent to school: they're at exactly the right age to learn all that stuff.
“Gen Z is very comfortable navigating software they’ve never used before, because they’ve been doing it their whole lives,” Bench said.
This is also true of Gen Y (Millennials), including myself, for the same reason.
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I think that this is not applicable to all gen Z
These articles never are
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