13 points

At least 10 percent of my time sitting in a classroom in college was waiting for the prof to get the projector to work with their laptop.

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2 points

So far I am lucky enough to have not had any classes that have had the issue of a professor not being able to get their projector or computer to work.

Closest I had was the Linux VMs we were using for a Linux fundamentals class were having troubles because someone gave them too much resources by accident (I think it was memory but I don’t fully remember), causing them to sometimes just stop working because there wasn’t enough for every VM. Somehow persisted pretty much the whole quarter before being figured out.

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2 points

Most of my time is lost on cloud services that got shittier over time.

My personal computer just works on Linux.

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31 points

“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?

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19 points

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?

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33 points
*

This study was only with 234 people.

“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.

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9 points

It’s actually simple.

HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn’t build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s’ UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don’t evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.

A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!

You just don’t make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can’t and they shouldn’t.

The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can’t throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don’t want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you’ll just get very nervous.

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1 point

A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!

I design control panels. I try to keep the workflow consistent not because I see value in it, but because some asshole decided that they didn’t want to pay for retraining. Really I don’t care, having to retool slightly every decade or so is pretty reasonable. Especially given that the tech is always changing.

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1 point

Especially given that the tech is always changing.

Humans don’t. Changing things is fine, making using them more complex for the same result, because another decade has passed, is not.

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1 point
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