[ChuckMcM]

People with no technical experience using modern technology, sometimes I explain this to folks as the "Chutes and Ladders" problem.

You set the problem up like this, person comes to you and wants to buy lunch. You put down a "Chutes and Ladders" game (minimum age 3) and you say sure as soon as your piece wins. Now wait and watch them. If they do anything that isn't in the rules you play a loud buzzing sound and scold them.

The thing is that "Chutes and Ladders" is like the simplest game ever, but when you combine "I'm trying to do X" with "Your trying to force me to learn Y". A number of people's brain just freezes up. I don't know if that is like some deep psychological principle but the fact that doing "Y" is totally unrelated to trying to get "X" done its like your brain refuses to allocate any cycles at all to learning Y. What is worse people get emotional and angry because dammit they want X and before you blocked them they knew how to get it.

We forget that as children when things were 'new' we expected to not know how to do them. But when we are set in our ways that level of change is much less tolerable. In a lot of ways all sorts of technology is like that.

One strategy I've had some success with is to take people who aren't trying to do anything with the new technology yet and just explore it with them. That goal of exploring allows them to ingest new concepts, and then when they try to do something with the technology some of those 'learn the game' concepts will already be in their brain.

[tonylemesmer]

Known as snakes and ladders UK side, using a die rather than a spinner for random number generation.

[SoftwareMaven]

The thing about Chutes and Ladders is that winning is subject to random chance. I don't think we want that to be the case with technology.

[baddox]

I don't really get your analogy. I've never played Chutes and Ladders, so I would probably be annoyed, but if the game is as simple as you infer, I suspect I would be able to accomplish the goal fairly quickly.

[ChuckMcM]

Yes you would be annoyed. Chutes and Ladders consists of activating a spinner, moving a piece along a path based on the number pointed to by the spinner, going 'up' if you land on a ladder or 'down' if you land on a chute, and you 'win' when your piece lands exactly on the last spot. You would probably get as few as 3 and as many as a half dozen 'buzzes' as you figured it out.

So you should try the test (or try it on an unsuspecting test candidate) my experience has been that no matter how 'simple' the game is, the fact that it seems completely orthogonal to the person, their ability to 'shift gears' and learn a new thing so that they can get on with the desired thing is blocked. It is especially true if you put a time limit on getting the desired thing done.

The challenge is that a number of things seem to have an assumption about your basic skills that may not be valid. An acquaintance went nuts when an app required that he cut and paste something on his phone. He had never had a reason to do cut and paste before so to complete the task he had to learn cut and paste. He was making zero progress on that goal. I did it for him, then later went back and showed him in a non time-constrained / outcome-desired setting how to do it. That worked fine of course, and now its part of his tool kit.

[alex_marchant]

I tried to use my parents' cordless home phone the other day, and felt like the tables were turned. I couldn't even figure out how to hang up.