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"How to help someone use a computer.", a guide from 1996 (pages.gseis.ucla.edu)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A friend shared a post from someone else that was talking about this article. I've quoted the text from that post below:

This is a 1996 guide on how to help someone use a computer. It's strikingly resonant with 'how to be a parent', or really 'how to help anyone with anything'. A nice example of "the universal within the particular"

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is all great advice, but I do want to add that it's mainly for beginners in one-on-one contexts, and not always appropriate when dealing with technical users in a group setting. For example:

Find out what they're really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?

It's frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don't know what they want to do. Not just for the person asking the question, but also for future people arriving at the thread with the same question. In some cases it really derails the conversation.

Hierarchical threads like on Lemmy or Reddit tend to be better for this than flat threads or chat channels, since it's easier to isolate and ignore red herrings. One reason I hate Discord and Slack for tech support.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It’s frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don’t know what they want to do.

You'll find that technical questions from experienced people tend to include "To do X, I'm doing...". Basically for two reasons: They're already accustomed to zooming out and looking for other approaches before even asking a question, aren't lost in the weeds, therefore asking the question top-down is natural, secondly, because they can predict the inevitable "you don't actually want to do this" answers if the approach is even a little bit off the beaten path.

Consider the flipside: Helpful people wasting their and your time teaching you how to build a flux compensator when all you wanted to do was make some coffee. Just buy a machine off the shelf. Interrogating, alas, is warranted in the majority of cases that's why it became a thing in the first place because most people aren't trying to engineer a novel flux-compensated coffee machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Excellent point. I often find myself torn between providing all relevant context to get ahead of this, and keeping my posts short enough that people will actually read them.