Are Windows XP/7 Users Smarter Than a 3-Year-Old?

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Are Windows XP/7 Users Smarter Than a 3-Year-Old?

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @12:06AM from the smarter-than-an-honor-student dept.

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!"

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Why change the interface at all by For+a+Free+Internet · 2012-10-23 00:10 · Score: 5, Funny

If it ain't broke, don't fix it! The problem is capitalism. Under socialism, production will be planned to meet human needs, not driven blindly by the whims of a market of idle parasitical bourgeois shareholders. CAPITALISM SUCKS, MICROSOFT SUCKS, FORWARD TO COMMUNISM, I DRanke coffee that I made with a coffeee makore thagt ish iu f,saoz-0-0-0-0- 0oiofdsalk fs;a;a a;;a the pain!

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1. Re:Why change the interface at all by Joce640k · 2012-10-23 00:54 · 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.
  
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  No sig today...
2. Re:Why change the interface at all by causality · 2012-10-23 02:48 · 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.
  
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3. Re:Why change the interface at all by citizenr · 2012-10-23 02:59 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it ... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
  Three year old also has no problems with eating dog shit picked up from the ground.
  
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4. Re:Why change the interface at all by B'Trey · 2012-10-23 03:08 · 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.
  
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5. Re:Why change the interface at all by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 03:25 · 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.
6. Re:Why change the interface at all by dinfinity · 2012-10-23 03:30 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it
  Try watching the video. The kid is absolutely terrible at using Windows 8. If this is the new definition of 'a champ', then the interface of Windows 8 can indeed be called 'a champ of an interface'.
  His dad has clearly (over the course of a month) learnt him some of the basics (like 'pin to the side') that work, but generally:
  - He has difficulties opening the start screen
  - He has difficulties making a program fullscreen again
  - He has difficulties in getting the list of open apps to show, erroneously selects the time app and then on second try stumbles upon the actual list of open applications.
  And if you think about it, the kid hasn't actually done anything remotely complex. Nobody ever argued that it would be impossible for new users to click on the fucking huge tiles to open an application or to learn a couple of basic gestures.
  Everybody did and does say that it most of the gestures are counterintuitive, cumbersome and that the interface in general fails when trying to do anything more complex than playing Angry Birds.
  This article is fucking bullshit.
7. Re:Why change the interface at all by mcgrew · 2012-10-23 03:33 · 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.
  
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8. Re:Why change the interface at all by paiute · 2012-10-23 03:49 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  That fails to explain why a three-year-old has no problems using it ... on a standard desktop PC. Like what the summary describes.
  Three year old also has no problems with eating dog shit picked up from the ground.
  Somewhere a Microsoft marketing executive leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. An idea was forming....
  
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3 year olds don't do that much. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 00:10 · Score: 5, Funny

They can't concentrate long enough to do any work...
I guess that makes Windows 8 a toy system... and still not suitable for work.
1. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by gtvr · 2012-10-23 00:14 · 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.
2. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by war4peace · 2012-10-23 00:21 · 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.
  
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3. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by devjoe · 2012-10-23 00:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Three-year-olds are likely to only focus on one program at a time, exactly the model Windows 8 presents, and the model which works well on a smartphone because of the limited screen space. Experienced adult computer users are likely to have email, multiple browser windows, a document they are writing or a game they are playing, and maybe other programs open at the same time. The comparison presented in the article is not a reasonable one.
4. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by ByOhTek · 2012-10-23 00:36 · 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.
  
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5. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by MickyTheIdiot · 2012-10-23 00:47 · 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.
6. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by somersault · 2012-10-23 00:54 · 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.
  
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  which is totally what she said
7. Re:3 year olds don't do that much. by Sir_Sri · 2012-10-23 03:17 · 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.
So what? by Simulant · 2012-10-23 00:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

No doubt anyone can learn it. Doesn't mean we want or need to.
Yeah! by ratnerstar · 2012-10-23 00:13 · 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.

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I hope I am wrong by dizzy8578 · 2012-10-23 00:18 · Score: 5, Informative

But I suspect win8 will continue the pattern of hiding useful menus and dialog boxes under more and more layers of what I consider obfuscated crap eye candy. My primary goal when using a computer is to get it back to functioning normally or at least how the client thinks is normally.
Each iteration of windows has placed more and more "purty" screens in front of the administrative tools and log files I usually need to fix something.
I will buy Win8 next week but mainly because I need to find where they have hidden the useful stuff before people start to bring the broken/mis-configured/AIO-printer install from hell, POS systems to me to fix or at least save their data/mail file from the only cost effective method of repair left open to the end user ie: (nuke it from orbit and reload)

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Re:You have to be kidding. by Compaqt · 2012-10-23 00:18 · 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.

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So it may be true... by Blinkin1200 · 2012-10-23 00:20 · Score: 5, Funny

Fisher - Price called, they want their UI back.
XCom: Enemy Unknown by SmallFurryCreature · 2012-10-23 00:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

XCom: Enemy Unknown has a 3D main interface where you can go to the seperate areas, with a fly animation zooming in on the sub sections of your base.
Nice the first time, meh the second, the 1000th time you scream and rage at your monitor and hurl the cat out the window.
Newbie friendly is a great market because you never run out of newbies but the moment a newbie has grown beyond the need for a newbie interface, you lost him forever.
There isn't much repeat business in the training wheel market.
W8 is MS Bob all over again. For older people like me, the desktop is like my toes, haven't seen it in decades. I startup the applications I need automatically and never even minimize them, the desktop could display my golden ticket to nirvana and I will never ever see it.
W8 to me adds just cruft I don't need or want and that increasingly seems to desire to get in the way. I don't use active desktop, widgets or gadgets (98, Vista and W7). The desktop has one use, to stop my applications from falling into the monitor.
I need a start menu to groups application, a taskbar to switch and that is it. End of fucking story.
And trying to sell me on something new because a 3yr old likes it... 3yr olds also like teletubbies, boogers and the word poop. poop... POOP! eheh POOP!!!

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what the hell? by amoeba1911 · 2012-10-23 00:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

The OS is just a platform to run your apps. Why are they making it seem like the OS is more than just a platform to run your apps? My software uses Windows, and I use my software, doesn't mean I use windows.
This whole idiotic notion of the OS being important started when Microsoft realized Windows was the most used desktop OS in the world, they figured people must love Windows. Nobody loves Windows! We all cope with it because it runs our god damn software. The only way Windows could be better is if it got out of the way and made our software run better and faster. Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that, they somehow think people care about the OS. I'm sure a huge majority of the users don't even know what an OS is.
Admit it, if you use Windows, it's only because it runs your software. The majority of my software runs only on Windows... but that's changing. Linux has lots of great software, and the moment when Linux has the majority of my software will be the moment when I ditch Windows for good and never look back, and I can see that date in the horizon already and there's nothing Microsoft can do to stop it. (except anti-competitiveness)
Re:Don't know what the fuss is about by bmo · 2012-10-23 01:54 · 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.
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Re:Anybody with more than half a brain by MightyMartian · 2012-10-23 03:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

Using the interface and actually being productive at the interface are two entirely different things.

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Wrong direction by PPH · 2012-10-23 03:47 · Score: 5, Funny

My grandpa likes the Windows 8 UI as well. I can only hope that Windows 9 will keep up with his increasing dementia.

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Re:Anybody with more than half a brain by wzinc · 2012-10-23 03:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Microsoft Office - Rated M for Mature