Old People & Computers

Is windows simple enough that a middle-aged person can easily grasp by him/herself you think?

It sometimes puzzles me about people of that generation. Take like my dad for example. Each time he MUST use internet explorer eventhough I have tried hard to get him to use firefox so that we can avoid all the spyware and ads shit. But he refuses to because he says he is use to IE and be a waste of time to learn another browser. Also the concept of like minimizing a window or like simple copy/pasting is like soo hard fo him. Not to mention the fact that the moment you re-arrage the desktop icons just slightly, he starts to get totally lost. Heck he STILL hasnt known how to properly open/save a Word Doc. Each time ask me or my siblings to do it. It just boggles me sometimes. I doubt changing to a Mac OS system would make like simpler. Nor changing to a Linux system.

Mind you, I have seen other middle-aged and older people who are able to easily grasp all these simple computer concepts.

I think it's pretty clear that computer's are like foreign languages; they're not going to come easily as you get older.

I'm no psychologist by any stretch, but my two parents, while they may have learned exactly what they have to do to get somewhere and the particular steps to take them there, they have a shitload of trouble applying the same steps to absolutely anything else. They have a different type of brain, it's wooden and rather than learn basics it learns routes. This is probably different for adults with more adaptive type brains that didn't grow up in the “do this, get to that, then do this” learning environment of the early 20th century.

Really, the perfect desktop for an adult is a 1-way stream of prompts, and as of right now that's exactly what a desktop isn't. The issue is that there are far too many choices for them to take into account. They've never dealt with a problem like that before they used computers.

Anyway, much of the issue lies in A) the mouse's unforgiving nature. Mac got the one-click right, but the movement of a mouse and the way it reacts with objects is itself totally hostile to newcomers. They need to make a desktop environment with a feathered range around any object and a mouse with a gravitational pull to it. Then, B) the number of “choices” you're confronted with at a desktop. Many things could be done to alleviate that, but doing them right is another question. Mac's docks are a good start, as they give you just what you need and nothing more, and it also got it right with centralizing every single action you can make on a file on a menu. Mac is much closer to user-friendliness than any other UI I've ever seen. It's too bad it isn't Windows.