[syberspace]

With teaching UI you breed the class of people who will shout the loudest when something changes. Teaching your parents that "the internet" is the blue icon in the taskbar will teach them to call you when microsoft decides to install chromium-edge on their machine because "the internet is gone". Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does. And with that anyone will be able to transfer that knowledge to a slightly different looking UI without much of a problem.

[setzer22]

Sometimes the views you see here are extremely biased. It's normal, we use computers all day, we are experts. We learn and adapt.

For some people, a computer is just another tool they've been recently forced to use in order to live in society (in many countries, you cannot longer reallistically do your taxes without a computer for instance).

As programmers, and especially those who work in UI/UX design, we owe some respect to those people, because those who take the extra effort to learn a radically new technology at an elderly age, are completely, utterly confused when companies decide to move stuff around just for the sake of it (or as a result of A/B testing?).

And yes, sometimes the only way I've been able to teach people how to operate a computer is by literally describing the UI and the icons. In my experience, finding a good way to teach via fundamentals to someome who doesn't care is extremely difficult. And believe me that I've tried it many times.

OTOH, note that none of my points apply to early education (school). In that case, I completely agree we need to teach the fundamentals, not UI.

[ghaff]

>Don't teach anyone how to use a specific UI, teach the concepts that made the UI look the way it does.

With all due respect, good luck with that. A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.

[int_19h]

The older UIs had those concepts, but it wasn't stuff like "how DNS operates". It was stuff like, "every app that works with documents has a File menu with New, Open, and Save in it". Or, say, "if you want to see all available actions for something that's represented by an icon, right-click for context menu". I taught my mom like that, and she was amazingly productive at learning new apps. She didn't always find the most efficient way to do something, but she always found a way to do whatever she needed to do.

Modern UI ditched all that. Just about the only consistent element is the hamburger menu, and how it looks once you open it varies drastically from app to app. In many cases, it's hard to even tell which elements are active and which aren't (because everything is flat!), and if they're active, what exactly they will do if you try to interact with them. When I got her an iPad - the very first one - she really struggled figuring it out, because not only all the existing concepts didn't apply, but there was no rhyme or reason to it in general.

[u801e]

> A lot of people aren't interested in learning about file systems or how DNS operates. They want to know what button to order from Amazon.

That's like saying people aren't interested in learning how to use a phonebook or how to call directory assistance. They just want to know who to talk to so they can order what they want from Sears.