Even though our computers are now better than 15 years ago, they still malfunction 11%–20% of the time, a new study from the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University concludes. The researchers behind the study therefore find that there are major gains to be achieved for society by rethinking...
Do they include "fighting with anti patterns and dark patterns" as broken? It's pretty insane how much misalignment there is between what most people want their computers to do and what the companies want people to do, which seems to largely be "look at ads literally everywhere".
"A number of the participants in the survey were IT professionals, while most of the other participants were highly competent IT and computer users. Nevertheless, they encountered these problems, and it turns out that this involves some fundamental functions,"
As someone that works in IT the amount of people I’ve come across that have little to no technical ability to be in that field is staggering. It had a high paycheck so they showed up. Doesn’t make them competent computer users.
Lemmy pointed me to another study a bit ago. It was ~216K people ages 16-65 and multiple countries.
One of the easy tasks was to use the reply-all feature for an email program to send a response to three people
According to that study this is where 43% of the participants skills ended(or didn’t even reach cause I stuck level 0 and 1 together).
This was the most depressing part…
The numbers for the 4 skill levels don’t sum to 100% because a large proportion of the respondents never attempted the tasks, being unable to use computers.
So my above 43% is really 69% of users. That’s where their abilities taper off.
"Up to 20%" is meaningless for a headline and is pure click bait. It could be any number between 0% and 20%. Or put another way, any number from no time at all to a horrifying more than an entire day per week.
Why not just state the average from what is probably a statistically irrelevant study and move on?
I certainly don't. If I can't fix it in 5 minutes, I just ignore the problem. And I wish everyone else would too and stop complaining about the smoke coming out of the machine. It's fine.
How about everyone who has zero skills with these problems, do they count is 0% spent on them as they outsource it or do they count as 100% since the smallest problem incapacitates their computer usage?
That number was more like 30% with a windows laptop and all the security crap Microsoft convinced my company to install. It was so painfully slow and glitchy. So I went rogue and put Linux on my company laptop 8 months ago and I'm not looking back.
Am I too millennial to have all these problems with computers? They've been in our homes for about forty years now. There's no excuse not to sit down and learn the basics of how it operates.
There has definitely been an inverted U-curve of computer competency over the last couple generations that I have noticed. The older folks didn't grow up with them, they have somewhat of an excuse. And the younger generation has been spoiled by advanced user interfaces and instant gratification, to the point where they don't know what a hierarchial filesystem is anymore and where their media is actually being stored.
Computers would be far less interesting if there weren‘t any problems to solve. Fiddling around really is half the fun for me, even when it can get frustrating.
I recognise the waste in waiting time, but I also think we are still increasing productivity more than enough to make up for it.
Personally I solve it by multitasking harder. Whenever there is a waiting time for a download or other stuff I simply start doing something else. I'm not going to waste my life watching loading bars for a living.
I don't think increasing user-friendlyness is a good solution. It's pretty much what caused the issues to begin with. Every time Windows or the apps make something more user-friendly it always results in more buttons to click and more updates to keep up.
I also spend an unreasonable amount of time just rearranging the windows in comparison to back when apps had keyboard-only GUIs with functions layered in different pages or tabs. I obviously don't think that is a good solution today either, but it goes to show that the bloated operating system has a lot of the blame.
Say you want to do something simple like renaming a file, you'll need to open an app to show the folders and files and also 100 different functions that are of no use for the specific task, position and scroll it where it's visible, navigate by mouse or keyboard and then do whatever you wanted. My point is that just operating the operation system is something that requires 10s of seconds over and over again every day. There's a long way from thought to execution for the simplest task.
The good thing is that it enables a lot of people to do so without any training at all, so maybe that makes up for it in total.