Are Windows XP/7 Users Smarter Than a 3-Year-Old? 537
theodp writes "Those sounding the alarm about the difficulty in making the transition to Windows 8, especially on traditional computers, should check out Adam Desrosiers' son Julian, a 3-year-old kid who uses Windows 8 like a champ. 'I read these tech pundits and journalists discussing how hard it's gonna be for the general public to learn the new UI of Windows 8,' says Desrosiers. 'Nonsense. The long and short of it is: If my 3 years old son can learn Windows 8 through very moderate usage, anybody with half a brain can do so too.' Bill Gates has already successfully made the transition to what he calls an 'unbelievably great' Microsoft Surface. On Friday, we'll start finding out if current Windows XP and Windows 7 users are also smarter than the average 3-year-old!"
Anybody with more than half a brain (Score:0, Insightful)
won't be using windoze to begin with.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
LMAO
So because a 3 year old can use the playskool interface the rest of us should suck it up? Dear Adam, no one gives a flying shit about you or your kid.
Yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions of children in China learn Chinese every year, without even really trying! And you think it's so difficult ... it must be because Chinese is incredibly easy to learn and you're just stupider than a baby.
Stupid stupid stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have to be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will very much believe his son can handle Windows 8. But all he's doing is opening up a movie or a game. He's not using the computer in the same way people do at the office juggling all sorts of stuff simultaneously.
So the question is not: Can people use Win8.
It is: Can people be productive with Win8.
Power users are the worst user (Score:2, Insightful)
Because have learned how something is done, but not why, and refuse to learn a different way that perhaps is better ( or just new ).
Windows 8 is for toys (Score:4, Insightful)
for grown up men who wish to get serious work done, you know.... like coding, making things happen; Windows XP and Linux distros are the thing.
Balls to Ballmer... he can go play with his dolls.
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
I was able to work my way through Windows 8 pretty easily. That's not the issue at hand, at all. this didn't stop me from hating its guts, because I needed to break free from my 15 years old habits and do it differently.
Habit change issues is exactly why we don't see cars with gaming controllers instead of the usual wheel-stick-and-pedals system. They might be great for the guy who never used anything before, but horrible for the long haul truck driver with 30 years of driving experience.
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Now get him to go into the network device settings and disable TCP offloading. Or change the IP. Or remove a rogue program from the context menu when you right-click files.
Whoops. Maybe that analogy doesn't seem so close now, does it?
Sure a 3-year-old can "use" the OS to do everything a 3 year old might want to do. But how easy is it for a parent to configure so that that 3-year-old CAN'T do things (e.g. get on the Internet in any way, shape or form, but be on the wireless so he can print out his work?), or for someone to set it up so that even the most genius 3-year-old + parent helping can't modify the settings you don't want modified (so that the staff member who brings their kid into school and let's them "just play" on the laptop can't run off and mess up their computer?)
That's an ENTIRELY different question. And something a 3-year-old can't do, and probably never will be able to do, on a Windows 8 PC.
My complaint with Windows 8 is not the lack of ability for a newbie to do things. It's the exact opposite. A lack of ability for a SKILLED IT USER to do things, and also a lack of ability to STOP a newbie doing things that are hard to undo for them (A show of hands: How many network admin's usual policy is to just delete the network profile of a user having trouble when the hardware is working fine and let it recreate itself?)
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah.
Not to mention a 3 year old can use an easy bake oven. There's a reason they don't replace the cookware in a professional kitchen with easy bake ovens.
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
The error I am seeing on this thread time and time again is the assumption that 3-year-olds are stupid.
They aren't. They have a hyper-active ability to learn that leaves all adults in the dust. This is exactly when they are learning languages and most of the building blocks of knowledge that are incredibly important and we take for granted.
I doesn't matter if they are "focusing on one thing." They are learning sponges at that age. The fact they would have no problems with basic use of Windows 8 isn't surprising at all and it has nothing to do with multitasking.
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:4, Insightful)
I always took the tack that Windows Surface was designed for a child, but if you need to do any work, the interface gets in the way. For common tasks, I think the home users will be fine for the most part, but if you need to dig into the OS to do any serious work you will end up fighting the UI.
I don't it's a matter of being 'smarter', but target audience.
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the reason you won't see gaming controllers on cars is that they suck for fine control when driving. If you drive in a real simulation game, using a steering wheel and pedals is preferable, because then you get several inches of travel to adjust control, rather than just one inch. In a real car do you always press your accelerator or brake as hard as you can? Because that's how most driving games are still set up these days
If you try playing a racing game or simulator in full simulator mode with a controller you'll probably see that you end up with much worse tyre wear than with a steering wheel/pedal setup. And that's if you can even control the car well enough in the first place. If you don't have traction control or some kind of input smoothing on the controls (which actually reduces your control level) then you're going to be spinning out all over the place.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't whether or not it's "easy to use".
The problem is that it's designed to be easy to use on tablets and tablets are rubbish for doing real work. On desktop machines ... it's crap.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
What a stupid assertion. Just like with any other tool, each has its own purposes at which it performs best.
Windows (XP through 7 excluding Vista) "just works", and it works damned well as a solid, easy-to-use desktop environment. Linux kicks ass for boxes you want to fire up and forget about for months at a time (home servers of various flavors). OS-X... um... Looks nice, I guess.
You can use more than one of these, even all of them, on a regular basis, without needing to forsake the others lest the True Believers(tm) cast you into the pit.
Now, Windows 8... Hey, perhaps it rocks the tablet world and will totally bury both Android and iOS. Perhaps not. For the desktop environment, however, thanks, but I don't have any need or desire to use a "minimalist" interface on my 3x 1920x1200 displays. A three year old can use it? GREAT! And I mean that... But I have a few more responsibilities, and a bit more capacity to deal with a sophisticated UI, than a three year old.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are supporting an economy that doesn't innovate?
If it isn't broke, we should still try to make it better. Now guess what in the process of trying to make things better sometimes often mistakes are made. So you can just be a whiny and say how bad it is and you say back on older technologies. Or look and take advantage of the new features, and work to clear up existing issues. Often such design changes offer tradeoffs, so you get something better and you may lose something.
Why change the interface at all... Well because we now have affordable multi-touch technology, this multi-touch technology changes on how we deal with system. My Laptop has a multi-touch screen and Windows 7 doesn't cut it, Hard to click small icons, zooming is choppy... Windows 8 makes multi-touch useful.
So when you get your next computer it may just come with a multi-touch display standard (like trying to buy a PC without a mouse) and your experience will be that much better. If you don't have a multi-touch now. Then don't upgrade.
Re:Don't know what the fuss is about (Score:5, Insightful)
and it seems half the people griping about it who claimed to have used it are really just repeating things they saw on a video, and haven't actually gotten hands on it.
Hi. I'm one of those people who have been dicking around with Windows 8 since within hours of the Developer Preview release.
I personally hate it. I will explain below.
>The funniest are the people who are complaining about the UI being too touch or mouse centric,
See, this is where you are wrong. It's not mouse centric.
Metro/ModernUI/Whatever they are calling it now is touch-centric and mouse navigation of it is full-retard. Because naturally all of us are supposed to want to reach out and swipe our greasy fingers on 24 inch monitors. sneer
Touchscreens are not new. They've been around for decades and the only places they took off were things like factory floor automation and data collection, POS systems, and portable devices, where a mouse and keyboard are either a drawback, wouldn't survive the environment, or are too bulky for portability. They never took off on the desktop, because using one for 8 hours at a desk is crap. Usability after usability study has come out and proved this tiime and again, yet Microsoft believes that the future belongs to touch on the desktop, as if the Mission Impossible fictional UI wasn't total bullshit. To top it off, Metro/Modern takes visual cues and defenestrates them nearly completely - everything is a hot corner or a key macro and the idea of the window is deprecated, even on large displays where there is plenty of room for floating windows and visual cues. Metro is like living in the land that time forgot of TSR task switchers and fullscreen-only programs.
Microsoft went from "we'll use the desktop metaphor for everything, including handhelds" to "we'll use a mobile device touchscreen paradigm for everything including desktops" and both ideas are crap because they ignore the fact that people use different sized formats and devices in different ways. They are still chasing after the completely fictional universal interface much like your lunatic friend who keeps trying to invent perpetual motion machines in his garage. It honestly boggles my mind.
Things like this video are a troll. They do not represent how regular users interact with desktop systems. It is there to imply that everyone who hates metro is dumber than a 3 year old, which frankly par for the course from Softie shills. Softie shills have this unfortunate habit of calling people with criticism of metro "luddites" or "stupid" or "afraid of change." It's an insult. It's much like the top-down thinking from the Gnome devs when they got negative feedback from users. It does nothing but piss people off. It certainly makes me more resolved in my hate for W8 and what the metro interface represents.
And lastly, if you design an interface for 3 year olds and idiots, only 3 year olds and idiots are going to like it. Welcome to the Idiocracy interface.
--
BMO
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't whether or not it's "easy to use".
The problem is that it's designed to be easy to use on tablets and tablets are rubbish for doing real work. On desktop machines ... it's crap.
That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it ... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
I propose that the three-year-old likes learning new things and that is why he had no problems with Win 8 and probably won't have showstopper problems with any other system. For him, learning is based on curiosity and wonder and the thrill of discovery.
Let him get a bit older. Then give him 12 years or so of schooling where learning is rote memorization that's pounded into your head - whether you like it or not - by people who treat you in a dehumanized fashion, like a number on a spreadsheet. Then he'll hate learning too. Then he'll work some job and require "retraining" after an upgrade because the functionality has remained the same, but the location of some superficial menu items has changed. It will be enough to confuse him. Gone will be the easy ability to take a look at the new interface and say "oh, they just moved it over there, but it does the same thing, I see" like he can do now.
Unless they take great pains to remain actual individuals, they will succumb.
It's probably not fair to average Windows users to compare them to a three-year-old. The three-year-old doesn't know it's supposed to be too hard, so it isn't. It's too much like pitting the average couch potato against a professional boxer. There is no sense in betting on the outcome.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't whether or not it's "easy to use".
The problem is that it's designed to be easy to use on tablets and tablets are rubbish for doing real work. On desktop machines ... it's crap.
That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it ... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
Two things. First, a three year old doesn't have to unlearn years of expectations of a system acting a certain way. Second, what a three year old is trying to accomplish on a PC might be just slightly different from the purposes of a typical business user.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, a three year old can use W8 easier than he can use W7 because he can't read! Plus, he hasn't been using the standard Windows interface for twenty years. The three year old isn't going to do any typing -- HE CAN'T READ.
In short, W8 is a very good OS... for a three year old. Not so much for someone who can read and type and needs to turn reports in to his boss.
W8 illustrates my worst gripe with all MS products, and that's that they insist on making you relearn the damned interface with every upgrade. Take Office; mine upgraded from 03 to 07 with the infernal god damned ribbon. It's as if they're trying to make the interface as hard as possible to use. Why rename "edit" to "home"? Why rename "file" to... well, to nothing at all, just a multicolored button that doesn't even have a mouseover and it's in the same place that one expects the max/min/close at the top left of the screen. Of course, a three year old doesn't need text, does he? It's as if MS designs its products for three year old illiterates.
I have report due monthly that's derived from an Access database. It was late this month; thanks, Microsoft. What's worse than trying to completely relearn the interface is it mangled the presentation of the report, and with all the god damned changes I'm having a hell of a time fixing it.
A computer isn't a toy for a three year old, it's a tool for adults to get real work done. Microsoft has yet to learn this... remember XP's kindergarten tinker toy looking interface?
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the 3 year old doesn't have the years of working with Xp/7 to bog him down & set expectations of how the OS should work.
Nor do they use a computer to attempt to solve the same problems an adult does. A 3 year old might want to find one thing, based on pictures. My desktop is juggling 12 different applications right now, and I found them based on descriptions not based on images. The work hours spreadsheet and the game balance spreadsheet have the same icon, but the content is somewhat important. Windows 8 is a trainwreck because it's inconsistent in how it manages lots of things, if you only ever want to do one thing at a time it's fine. It's like my phone - me and a 5 year old could manage 99% of the use cases on my phone equally well, because I'm only rarely actually multitasking, and most everything complex is buried. But try and actually manage half a dozen running programs on windows 8 and you're jumping between UI's, trying to figure out which applications did and which didn't create icons on the traditional desktop. If you have several hundred programs installed (which is not btw, unreasonable on windows or linux), the 'metro' style can be much harder to navigate.
I agree with posters in reply, a lot of this is muscle memory, and changing that is hard - but the question is whether or not I benefit from it. If you try windows phone (which is essentially the basis for windows 8) it's interesting and different from the iPhone/Android style. I'm not sure better or worse overall, but it's certainly a different take on the same basic problem. And it works reasonably well at it (again, not sure better or worse than the alternative but definitely different). But windows 8 isn't just windows phone 8, losing productivity without any apparent pickup in productivity is troublesome. I've got a windows 8 convertible tablet, and it's a nightmare to use unfortunately, it's fast, which is good, but it can't decide how it's going to behave, so I think I'm going to roll the machine back to vista when the preview build gets shut off.
The bigger questions with windows 8, about the store (which conflicts with the open platform nature of windows, and pisses off their suppliers) and the big industry questions of whether forking windows into an x86 and ARM version is going to cause no end of confusion (does a 3 year old care? no, but you can bet a 63 year old buying a computer does), the 'Surface' initiative as either a good kick in the pants to the 3rd party hardware guys or sign of microsoft entering the hardware market are all things that are *bad*, and well beyond a 3 year old. A 3 year old can look at pictures and click on them - and that's what microsoft was aiming for, but that has no bearing on how to build a productivity desktop for 15-85 year olds.
Re:3 year olds don't do that much. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree this is likely but who among us is going to argue that the Window UI can't use some improvements?
By comparison when I got my iMac desktop, it took me very little time to adjust to the way things work under OS/X, mostly because they made a lot of sense. There are some things I find strange, odd design decisions but overall it works fairly well.
The big thing for me is: I want to be able to ignore the OS most of the time, I am there to use my programs to do work or have fun. The OS should be so transparent I forget its there. Of course a lot of users don't or can't make the distinction between what is OS and what is application these days. And they don't really care.
As others have said... (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy to use doesn't necessarily mean usable for the purpose.
My 10 year old cell phone was extremely easy to use - dial the number, press send, and voila, I just made a phone call. A 3 year old could do it.
My smartphone is much harder - unlock the phone, go to the home screen, find the dialer app, start it up, open the dial-pad, dial the number, and voila, I just made a phone call (unless it got dropped).
But my smart phone is still much more usable and useful than my old phone ever was despite being much harder to use.
Let's see how the uber-smart 3 year old handles multitasking on typical office apps - run a report from the ERP system, copy the last 2 years of performance metrics to a spreadsheet, run projections from the numbers, then move the key results to a powerpoint slide. All while carrying on an email conversation with your boss about why you don't have the presentation ready yet.
Unless the typical Win8 user uses their computer the same way as a 3 year old, I'm not sure why it's relevant how well a 3 year old can use it.
It's not about ease-of-use (Score:5, Insightful)
I can learn to use Win8 just fine. It's not about ease-of-use, or how easy it is for a 3-year-old.
I don't want Win8 because it doesn't have the UI I need, plain and simple. I'm not playing the simple games a 3-year-old plays. I'm not just browsing the Web. I'm a professional software developer who needs a fairly large number of applications open at the same time, spread across 2 monitors. I'm doing coding, technical writing, spreadsheets, diagrams, running visual diff/merge tools, editing XML and HTML and Javascript and CSS, mucking about with databases. I'm running multiple SSH sessions to multiple machines to troubleshoot production issues. At home I'm playing an MMO, running a log parser, running the voice-chat client, running the browser to look up encounter strategies, all at once. And all of this? The one thing Win8 adds, the Metro UI, isn't just not designed to do this, it's designed to not do this. It's designed to have a single application visible at a time, the way a smartphone or tablet works.
Yes, I know, I can kick it back into traditional desktop mode. But that means extra steps every single time I use it, or using a third-party program to hack it into doing what I want. Win7, by contrast, doesn't need hacking or extra work. I see no reason to add extra work and non-vendor-supported hackery to get back to where I am now. Plus there's the question of software support: how many of the programs I must use every day will officially support Win8? Right now none. Not even the ones from Microsoft. I'd have to upgrade all my software to get versions with official support. And for work I can't upgrade, I have to remain on the versions that the company mandates internally. They won't be upgrading any time soon either, they have to first certify every single application as working on Win8 and then they have to get money budgeted to upgrade. In some cases software will have to be repurchased, and there's manpower and other costs associated with upgrading all those computers to a new OS and migrating all the existing data. Our hardware vendor will have to support Win8 on the hardware too or we'll have to purchase all new hardware. So overall the company isn't even going to think about Win8 until the next hardware refresh cycle comes along, and that isn't going to start for another 3 years or so. We just finished a hardware refresh at the end of last year, after all.
So in summary, it doesn't really matter how easily a 3-year-old with no exposure and no existing infrastructure requirements can use Win8. It matters how well Win8 suits the tasks I actually perform and the requirements I have for what my system needs to run. A 3-year-old can easily ride a Big Wheel, but that doesn't make a Big Wheel suitable as a vehicle for me to commute to work in.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
I propose that the three-year-old likes learning new things and that is why he had no problems with Win 8,
And I propose that just like a cardboard picture book, an interface designed for 3 year olds and retards will be easier for them to learn.
If your logic made any sense at all, newspaper articles would be replaced with pictures of smiling cartoon animals, and the people competing in the Tour de France would all be using training wheels.
The entire idea that "easy for a child" equates to "better for an adult" is completely fucking stupid, and you ought to feel like an ass for even suggesting it.
Re:Anybody with more than half a brain (Score:5, Insightful)
Using the interface and actually being productive at the interface are two entirely different things.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:5, Insightful)
If it isn't broke, we should still try to make it better.
The trouble is, they don't improve, they simply change. Take that stupid ribbon interface: renaming "edit" to "home" was brain-dead retarded. That's not an improvement, that's a degradation. Taking away all text from the file menu and moving it to where you expect the max/min/close usually are isn't an improvement, it's a degradation.
How is anything about W8 in any way an improvement?
Or look and take advantage of the new features
What new features?
Often such design changes offer tradeoffs, so you get something better and you may lose something.
If any functionality is lost, that's NOT improvement.
My Laptop has a multi-touch screen and Windows 7 doesn't cut it
Prove you're not lying. What touch screen laptop comes with W7? You're insulting our intelligence.
Windows 7 doesn't cut it, Hard to click small icons, zooming is choppy...
Odd, I don't have those problems on my small W7 laptop or my kubuntu tower, and never had them with any other MS OS.
Re:Anybody with more than half a brain (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anybody with more than half a brain (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:4, Insightful)
"a three year old has no problems using it"
Sorry but that statement needs a LOT of qualifications. That 3 year old is organizing his photographs in folder and setting up his backup schedule, or is he clicking on the colored boxes...
If my daily computer use was just clicking on colored boxes, Yes a 3 year old is superior.. I do a LOT more complex things that I GUARENTEE that the 3 year old is NOT doing.
The whole thing is a joke of a test.
Re:Why change the interface at all (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that most people quit thinking like kids; they get afraid to try new things.
I'm 60 and not afraid to try new things, provided there's a reason. And I have yet to see anyone put forth a single reason to try W8.
Also, arguments can be made all day about the interface being designed to be easier, but it's not what we're used to; it's a shallower learning curve for new users, but all our new users are kids, and learning the new interface for existing users is a waste of what could otherwise be productive time blah blah blah MS Office Ribbon blah blah...
OK, we have the new Microsoft Car. The brake's on the right and the throttle's on the left and you have a joystick instead of a steering wheel. A brand new driver would have no more triouble learning to drive it than a normal car, but someone who's been driving for twenty years is going to wreck the damned thing as soon as he drives it off of the car lot.
Microsoft has given compelling reasons why it's in their interest to make the desktop act like a phone, but they've given exactly zero reasons of how it's beneficial to a user.
If a change makes the job easier, that's a good change. If it has a learning curve and makes the task harder even after you're over the curve, that is NOT innovation, that's just stupidity.
Jacob Neilson, [computerworld.com] one of the prominant useability experts, says W8 is crap for useability, and it's not just an opinion, he did the research.
As to the "thinking like kids", well,
Re:Anybody with more than half a brain (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, I don't see to many 3 year old's using Microsoft Office applications, or SQL databases. The kid is just playing Metro Games, of course that's easy.
Not to mention that he has zero ingrained habits about how to use a computer. I don't hate the Office Ribbon because I can't figure it out - I hate it because instead of doing productive work, I'm wasting time figuring out where they hid the command this time.