Key in the cognition - March 17th, 2008

08:58 am - Observations on watching a kid use a computer

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer.

Like many people, he was using webmail as online storage. Surprisingly, he was using his mom's Yahoo/SBC account instead of having one of his own. I've heard that Google was surprised to discover how many people type entire domain names into their search box instead of the browser's address bar but watching this in person is still pretty weird. The kid typed "yahoo.com" into the Safari search box, which brought up Yahoo as the top hit. That's when it got even more bizarre. Google had conveniently provided links to the commonly used subsections of Yahoo in the search result. The first of these was Mail, on which I expected to see the kid click. Instead he just clicked on the main link and went to the yahoo home page before eventually logging in and arriving at his inbox.

The next observation to surprise me was the difficulty he had selecting text with the mouse. I'd previously assumed that any middle-school kid in San Francisco would be an expert mouse-user and he certainly displayed no other signs of impeded dexterity so I am tempted to attribute this difficulty to unfamiliarity with basic usage of a mouse. My hunch is somewhat supported by his complete surprise at my introduction of the scroll-wheel to his arsenal of mouse-using techniques. Later on I noticed that he tended to backspace his way through multiple words upon realizing that he'd mistyped one instead of just repositioning the cursor. Admittedly, I have seen this behaviour in expert computer users as well.

Made me wonder how much exposure kids really get to computers in school and how many kids in this city lack access to one at home. Maybe desktop computers are just getting old though, since he seemed to have no trouble using his cell-phone. Finally, I can't help but wonder if there's a way to make the enormous number of people currently using webmail as storage to start using the more effective tools we now have available for storing dynamic textual documents on the Web.