(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:30 am)
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly introducing Dad to the wonders of modern computing. We got him a nice Athlon laptop from HP with the basics. He’s really enjoying it so far, having progressed from surfing some news websites every day to copying digital photos from his new camera, to now ripping MP3s to his personal music library! It’s pretty exciting for him (and me), and it’s good for me to watch a neophyte computer user master new concepts.
Computers are still pretty darn confusing and difficult to use.
Double-click to launch of program? Single click for buttons? It’s only through long experience, I realize, that I know what to click at all.
The Windows Media Player 9 interface is a horror to behold. It has a surface attractiveness (shiny!), but learnability and usability are sub-par. Media Player 10 is not much better. For my Dad, the Media Player interface looks like a collection of tiny buttons scattered all over the screen…it’s terrible. It’s hard to tell what’s a primary button, what’s a control, and what you need to click on to get anything useful done. It’s an awful user interface…it might as well be a command-line interface.
Dad was introduced to the concept of multi-tasking today also. He was impressed by how you could move windows around, and each one could do a different thing. I think he looked at computers as being able to do one thing at a time, which isn’t a bad model to have actually.
There’s a terrible traffic jam on the desktop as dozens of marginally useful programs clamor for attention to “update” or “associate themselves with convenient functionality”. i spent several hours squashing them dead so they wouldn’t bother Dad.
It struck me that there really should be a better help product that not only introduces the computer in terms of useful things to do, but hides a lot of the desktop / shell functionality away. Sort of like the Launcher for MacOS 9. Maybe this is what the Google Desktop and AOL are trying to do… make a task-oriented GUI for both the Internet and the Desktop.
2 Comments
There probably is some prior history there, but I’m shocked, *shocked* that you would force your awesome dad into the virus laden, pop-up ad stacked, general crappy world of Windows. Of course I’m biased for the Mac, but since your dad sounds like a computer newbie, I’m unsure why you would choose a PC over a nice iMac running OS X. I guess you’ll just have to get really good at instructing him how to re-install Windows over the phone once his computer becomes a spam relay zombie machine for the 12th time. :-)
You know I love ya Dave, just giving you a hard time!
– Ged
——-
Hey Ged!
Yeah, I hear ya! It’s primarily a support issue in Taiwan. He lives in the central part of Taiwan, where Mac support of any kind is a bit hard to come by. The second thing is to have the broadest possible range of product available to him so he can try different things; while the Mac has excellent solutions available, they just aren’t as easy to find where he lives. I’m bullet proofing his PC as much as possible to prevent possible infection, and am installing the remote help stuff to try to keep an eye on it.
My mentality is to just let what happens happens when he gets back :-)