I turned 56 today. Why I am telling you this? Because perhaps we older users are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to understanding this technology. When I began to work at age 21, there were no computers of any kind in the office in which I worked and I believe I was about 30 when I acquired my first personal computer. So, yes, I spent the first three decades of my life dealing with rotary phones and being otherwise illiterate about the technology many of you younger people were born into. There may well be many people my age and older who have no difficulty mastering cell phone technology. Good for them. However, I am no ***** and I expect I am not alone among those 50+ who experience significant frustration with complex cell phone technology.
Far and away my biggest complaint is documentation, including interface design. Let me illustrate with an example that has nothing to do with Android per se, but makes the relevant point.
When I turn on my Mac, I am sometimes presented with a dialog box that asserts:
Updates Ready to Install: Do you want to install these updates now or try tonight?
....and here are my choices:
Restart
Later
Do I need to explain the problem? I suspect that "Restart" really means "Restart in order to install the update right now".
But simply offering "Restart" is ambiguous - why should one infer that this will result in update installation? Why not offer "Install Now" followed by a statement that this will involve a restart and offer the choice to proceed or not?
Another example that indeed is relevant to Android. Whether you realize it or not, for those of my vintage, the word "synchronize" never meant what it means now. The term used to simply denote the activity whereby multiple time-keeping devices were set to a common time (as in "lets synchronize our watches"). The term now has an entirely different meaning, at least when used in relation to cell phones and computers. So I need to "unlearn" a number of things that many of you do not have to.
In summary: I suggest that people under, say, 30 years of age have a number of advantages with respect to dealing with modern technology:
1. Their brains are more "plastic" and can learn new things with less effort;
2. They do not have to "unlearn" a lot of things (like what "sync" means);
3. They have developed the ability to ignore the instructions and figure things out by tinkering. I politely suggest that we older users grew up in a world where people read more and were therefore better communicators. So we older people are habituated to consulting the documentation rather than tinkering. And because the quality of the documentation (including the intelligibility of instructions presented 'on the screen') is so dubious, we are frequently stymied in our efforts to understand how to use this technology.
So, yes, I am having great difficulty understanding my new Moto G, not least why connecting my cell phone to my Mac causes my Mac keyboard to freeze. How in the world am I supposed to figure that out?
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