Computer Jargon Too Difficult for Office Workers 601
slashflood writes "Most office workers find computer terms such as javascript and jpeg just as difficult to understand as a foreign language, according to a new survey. A poll of 1,500 staff by recruitment firm Computer People showed that three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant. 'A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.'"
Article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I laughed myself sick reading this article...especilly the oh-so-helpful second page, entitled 'what it all means'.
Here's an especially good one from the list:
With 'helpful' articles like this, us IT professionals should remain in demand for a good long time. ^_^
But seriously, a good IT professional isn't one who's good at explaining the jargon, or getting laypeople to understand the technical isues...it's one that takes care of the issues for the laypeople, so they don't need to worry about them. A correctly managed IT department should be all but transparent to the other people in the office. Everything should just work, with the IT guy making certain the users' needs are met before they even know what they are. In a correctly managed facility, the IT guy's phone should almost never ring.
Users aren't the only problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Among CIOs, an amazingly large number of them think that office workers should have the permissions to turn their firewall off.
A massive 61% ... have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.
A massive number of mail administrators don't know how to configure their mailservers thus allowing this to happen.
I could go on...
News at 11... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
Why should they care? (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as sending huge files goes, they still don't need to know the differences between file sizes. People shouldn't be sending large documents through email anyway. A few megs at the MAX. Public drives or a webserver for anything else and the users should be educated on that.
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
And a massive 99% of people don't need to understand that. Mail servers should be designed to ignore e-mails of a larger size than they can handle. It's not up to the users to understand KB, MB, GB, mail server loads, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, SSH, whatever.
Their understand lies in doing their jobs effectively, whatever that may be. When my doctor refers to medical jargon I may not know what it means and may be confused (I'm generally well versed in my particular conditions) so do you really expect them to understand what the jargon in your field is?
Blah.
Education (Score:5, Insightful)
In related news (Score:5, Insightful)
The terms aren't the problem; it's the fact that your average cubical dweller simply doesn't want to learn them.
I've personally explained how to fix a the same problem several times to the same person, yet they keep asking me how to fix it every time it comes up. If they'd simply listen the first time and learn how to do it rather then noding the whole time maybe they'd be able to help themselves once and a while.
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:5, Insightful)
And as far as I'm concerned, workers need to get used to the jargon or take a hike. Measurements and particular jargon abound in all walks of life. If you're making cookies, for example, you need to understand a cup, teaspoon, pint, etc. (or liter and the like if you're not American). If you build a shed, you need to know what a foot or meter is, don't you? In those disciples, you also need to know things like what a hammer is, or a mixer. Computers aren't any different. No one is asking that the average user understand coding, but understanding things like storage space is a requirement.
Re:News at 11... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News at 11... (Score:5, Insightful)
>
> I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
And that's the fundamental problem. Most people these days not only don't think they have to learn, they don't think they should have to learn. (And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)
Every time you hear someone say "I shouldn't have to read the manual to figure out how to use it!", you're seeing another example of the problem.
Re:Article misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Among office workers 26% aren't sure what a firewall does and therefore have been tempted to turn it off.
...and yet, on the second page, they didn't even explain what a firewall was, so I guess that 26% still won't know.
Re:Simple solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
And you wonder why people hate IT departments.
Listen, this "holier than thou" attitude is just stupid. Do you know how to diversify a portfolio to meet acceptable risk according to an efficient frontier formula? Well, some of those "idiot users" do. Does that make them smarter than you? If so, should they have veto power on how you run the network?
IT people are not necessarily smarter, despite what they may think. The goal is to work together in a company, and find solutions that take into account problems that employees may have. Which also means that locking everyone's computer so they can't do anything may not be the correct solution. Maybe, just maybe, users occassionly have a need that you're going to have to work extra to fullfill. That's why you were hired, not so you can sit on your duff and complain about all the work that users make for you.
My Secretary (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, a good IT professional isn't one who's good at explaining the jargon, or getting laypeople to understand the technical isues...it's one that takes care of the issues for the laypeople, so they don't need to worry about them.
I think you came very close to hitting the nail on the head, but instead walked away with a brusined thumb. For most of us, understanding the issues that these people don't understand is common knowledge to us. We can take the time to explain these things to our customers or we can fix the problem, we can explain how to avoid similar problems in the future, or structure the environment to avoid them. To me, a "good IT professional" is one who recognizes what the customer wants and provides. Having worked a few help desk and similar type positions, I can tell you that some people don't want the problem fixed, they want to understand the problem. Others don't care, they just want it to work.
Now, there may be other obstacles to providing exactly what the customer wants. Most help desks don't want you spending 20 minutes on the phone with someone explaining why sending Grandma who's on dial up, 20 pictures from your 8MP digital camera may not be a good idea. However, I've always found that taking the time you have available to explain things at the level the customer wants, results in a much happier customer.
I said customers, but this of course can apply to anyone for whom you are working on a problem for. This also applies outside of IT. When I had someone in last year to clean our ducts, I spent a lot of time talking with him to find out what I could do to reduce dust and such in the air and picked up a lot of valuable information that has saved me money since then. Next time I need the ducts cleaned, I'll be calling him back because he was willing to pass on information and experience to me.
That is normal ... sort of (Score:3, Insightful)
Every field has its jargon that is virtually undecipherable for outsiders.
Think about medicine for example, and the names of medical conditions.
Or think about botany, or construction engineering.
Where the problem lies is that unlike the above fields, computers have become pervasive, and embedded everywhere.
If computers have remained in mainframe rooms with an army of programmers and operators, this would never have been an issue. It became an issue after the PC was invented and made it to every office and every home...
Live with it
Re:Article misses the point (Score:2, Insightful)
But to comment on the quote: "But I don't feel I should know more - that is their job. If we did it all ourselves they would be out of a job." There is a big difference between knowing how to do day to day things (like not running programs from shady websites / MSN / email / etc.) and knowing how to configure a computer.
To entend the car analogy, I recall being a small child and not knowing what the "triangle" button did. And, being four or five, I had two viable options, push the button, or ask. In my experience with supporting users, either case is terrible for support staff (they either have to explain way too much, or fix the broken machine). Pity support staff.
Re:Article misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only sort of true. Sometimes users have to know some jargon. Sometimes users have to understand the technical issues well enough to avoid them. A real helpdesk pro (or anyone that deals with customers/users) will avoid jargon when possible. When technical issues need explaining, a good IT professional will distill the issues into a couple simple metaphorical ideas, making them no more complicated than they must be, and expect that the user probably won't remember the explanation for next time.
Some users even insist on knowing why. You tell them you can't send an EXE through the e-mail system, and they ask "why?". You tell them it's a security issue, and they say, "so?"
Some users won't accept any explanation they're given if it keeps them from doing what they want, and that's the real measure of your skill. How well does your helpdesk tech deal with the belligerent CEO who is completely irrational and has unrealistic expectations? If your tech can walk away, without giving in to the unrealistic demands, but also without the CEO feeling insulted or ignored, your tech has just earned his paycheck.
So what am I saying? Forget the education angle. Users can't be educated. The real key to helpdesk interaction is to keep your users happy and feeling good about their computers, so that when you tell them "You can't do that," you won't really have to explain why (with all the jargon). They'll just believe you.
I'm barely joking.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a mechanic -- hell, I don't even change my own oil -- but I understand "spark plug", "alternator", "transmission", "brake pad", "muffler"...
I'm not a doctor, but I understand "catheter", "seratonin reuptake inhibitor", "priapism", "cyst", "tumor", "intestinal tract"...
So why the fuck can't these people understand that 1,000,000 KB = 1,000 MB = 1 GB, and that it takes about a minute to download 20 MB? I don't mind that they can't write a shell script, set up keys for SSH, configure a firewall, or understand that MSIE is not "the internet". But for fucks sake, you know how much a galon of gas is, you know how much a quart of oil is, how much 10mg of prozac is... How hard is it to understand one more unit of measurement?
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get this.
You suggest blocking emails past a certain size, but you don't think people need to understand those sizes?
How are they supposed to know whether what they are trying to send is too big or not?
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Metric system (Score:2, Insightful)
This is partially a side effect of not understanding the metric system. Cue Grandpa Simpson's quote about gas milage. While certainly a mail administrator can configure this to avoid overflowing their own system, the end user will still generate a complaint as to why they can't send mail. The real misunderstanding is file size comparisions. For example, if you didn't know how big a "gigabyte" was, you might think one or two gigabytes wasn't very large (as far as emails go).
I know the feeling... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of it this way... Worker is given work -> worker does something -> worker produces finished product. That something might include alphabetizing files, or driving their car, or hammering in nails. If the worker couldn't read, couldn't drive a car, or couldn't use a hammer, we'd call them unqualified to do their job. We'd wonder why they were ever hired and when they'll be canned. How is using a computer different?
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:4, Insightful)
To my simple mind, TPS is "Transactions Per Second". "Test Procedure Specification" would never have entered my mind.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
> (I'm generally well versed in my particular conditions)
If your doctor regularly says things you don't understand, and you don't bother to ask/learn,
some day you might die as a result. I would have died in July of 1996 if I hadn't been
curious at that the acronym "TBI" stood for. I was slated for spot radiation to complement
my high-dose cytoxan chemotherapy. If I had gotten the total body irradiation that was
written on my order, I would not have survived.
Jargon is fucking important. People should take the time to understand it.
Math? (Score:2, Insightful)
They would if it was gigadollars, kilodollars and megadollars.
This is not a jargon issue, this is bad math.
Alvaro
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but a computer is a device, not a tradecraft. Furthermore, unlike a device like a car or pocket calculator, it is a platform for entertainment and productivity, and it is far more complex than both and truly requires an additional vocabulary to operate it efficiently. And the complexity isn't necessarily the hardware, but in the lack of standardization, the abstraction of the interface, and in the necessities of modern security. The home computer is still a novelty to the general public, believe it or not. Partly because it's still a relatively expensive investment and prone to all kinds of exploits, tricks, and scams as soon as you connect it to the Internet.
Think about evertyhing you must put in place to properly secure a Windows PC, for example. First, you must install a virus scanner. For the majority of users, this *is* a must, because they really aren't savvy about e-mail attachements, message spoofing, and shady-looking websites. Then you need at least a software firewall, which pops up a prompt the first time each app request a network connection -- and the prompts aren't always very informative. Win32 Generic Host Process? Um, okay, I guess. Either that, or you get a router, and that requires hooking it up with the modem and the computer. And God help you if you need to start forwarding ports and setting up wireless encryption. Then there's IE's default settings that allow browser helper objects, referral IDs, and every cookie that gets thrown your way.
So what to do when you don't even know what a firewall is? When you aren't aware of the importance of shrinking down that huge "jpeg" you took with your digital camera before mass mailing it to all your friends and family who have email addresses? There's a lot of technical awareness that
Culture (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Users aren't the only problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh. Well then, accounting should also have a say in hiring. (Including tech people.) As should the mail room. Not to mention the cafeteria staff. And let's not forget the janitorial staff! It's very important that people who understand how to properly read the recycling labels are chosen! After all, it's only fair.
Either train them, get them a "seeing eye dog" IT monkey to follow them everywhere and do things for them, or fire them.
I agree. Has your department taken proactive action to see that all the employees are properly trained or have the support they need?
And, yes, I believe I could manage a risk portfolio. If I can figure out how to manage IT security risk, I can figure out how to manage a company's financial risk position. It's not really that different, just apply a the same types of reasoning and information gathering to a different set of scenario parameters and information.
Oh, good Lord. If that were true, you'd be out making all the money you need, not stuck with "idiot users" in a job you obviously hate. BTW, here are the computations [wikipedia.org] for Modern Portfolio Theory. Knock yourself out. I hope you know where to get the data from and how to adjust the frontier for a variety of inputs, investment styles, tax limitations, bonds, and mutual fund products. (Not that you're likely to know what an investment product is. They're all stocks, right?)
It's also how its explained... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Article misses the point (Score:2, Insightful)
very good, sir, very good
some people really do want to know, and if you're there to help them with it, I think that's part of the job.
other people don't want to know what something means not because he's stubborn or stupid, but sometimes it's only because "the issue will never come up again"
I think that everyone's time is just as valuable as mine, and there are a lot of things I don't know about that others do, such as how to work an excel spreed sheet properly. It's not because they're stupid, it's simply because they have other things to take care of while we had our time to learn what things mean. To me, a good IT person will teach you how to do most simple things that the user is likely to see again, but will take difficult tasks, or tasks that are unrelated to the user's usual work day, off his hands.
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:4, Insightful)
So what to do when you don't even know what a firewall is?
You learn. A firewall is a very simple idea - it attempts to keep dangerous stuff away from you, just like a real firewall.
When you aren't aware of the importance of shrinking down that huge "jpeg" you took with your digital camera before mass mailing it to all your friends and family who have email addresses?
Knowing about files and their sizes is a basic part of operating a computer. That's like driving a car and not knowing that you have to change the oil.
good advice (Score:3, Insightful)
1) good idea. Ignorance of computer terms may be frustrating to those of us who use them fluently, but know-it-alls who overuse jargon (in any field) to appear smarter to novices are just assholes.
2) is Manging Director of Computer People Adam Fletcher's real job title? Is IT Director jargon? ;)
The answer is probably meeting the users half-way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like most things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Educate the users on *some* of the jargon, but try to construct an environment where as many technical details are invisible as possible, so they only need to know a few basic concepts to function in the office.
The biggest obstacle I see these days is the tendency for smaller or mid-sized businesses to try to cust costs on I.T. - eliminating full-time I.T. support staff, in favor of going with a service contract or a part-time worker. This does prevent the problem of paying someone to sit around and surf the web, etc. while they "wait for something to break". But it also causes such things as the situation mentioned in the article where users could simply "turn off their firewall" or make other harmful system changes. (EG. Can't send out my email!? Hey, maybe it's my network card settings! I remember the support guy at home walking me though that stuff in my "Control Panel" under "Networking" when I called for help with my DSL!. I'll try changing some of these numbers around in here!) Users are given more "administrator-type" system privileges due to the lack of real, full-time I.T. staff, and they begin tinkering with things, knowing it'll be a while before they get help otherwise. Then you've got much worse problems....
Breaking news -- average IQ is 100 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Article misses the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breaking news -- average IQ is 100 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:News at 11... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you expect me (a hypothetical pilot in training) to read your owner's manual? I'll look at it when I can't figure out how to start the engine and again when the engine stalls at 5000 feet, but I just don't have the time to sit there and read it cover-to-cover no matter how much I'll learn from it. I'm too damn busy doing my own work. If I'm forced to read the manual to learn something about how your aircraft functions, that means your aircraft engineer needs to be fired.
If you've never flown a plane before, and you get hired as a commercial pilot, "your own work" is flying a plane. Sorry, but that involves knowing lots of unnecessary crap like what an engine is, what RPMs mean, why oil pressure is important, and so on.
If you're an office worker who's never emailed someone before, and your co-workers use email to communicate with each other, learning what "email" is (bits, bytes, file sizes, file formats, base64/MIME, addresses, domain names, bounce messages, headers, and where messages are stored on the server and client side... is part of your job.
The intuitiveness of the UI is orthogonal to the real problem -- the less the end user reads, the more likely it the end user is going to lack the theoretical foundations that are essential to "doing their own work" in a way that doesn't result in spectacular failure.
Whether that failure is 500 copies of a 24-megabyte .BMP file sitting on a mail server ("well, I just had to click 'send to everyone' when I saw that cute picture of that kitten!") or a smoking crater ("My job is to fly the plane, I don't put gas in it, and besides, it's not my fault that some stupid mountain was sitting under those fluffy white clouds!"), the root cause is the same.
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why should they care? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the real world, it's easy to tell if something should be mailed or not. Pick it up. Is it a brick or is it a few sheets of paper? In a computer, it's very difficult. Click "view details" on your file manager. Compare that number with what you know about hard drive sizes, network speeds, etc. Computers need a different way to indicate file size than an often obscured number. For text files, it's not too hard. Maybe show a thicker icon that looks like a stack of pages. One sheet == small. Many sheets == big, might want to FedEx that one -- I mean not email it. With images and other file types, it's not so easy. More creative minds than mine can surely come up with something though. Maybe it needn't be a real space analogy like the stack of pages.
That still leaves one problem. File size per se doesn't matter; it's relative file size. But relative to what? Ten years ago, you might not want to email 1 meg attachments. Now it's not such a big deal (excepting dialup). How does an interface like above reflect this and answer the question: is this ok to email? Or at a different level, what are we trying to indicate by "file size"? How much disk space it needs? How long it will take to download? How long it will take to read? All of these are intuitively known for real space objects due to lifetimes of experience. The fact that every computer file has an icon the same size as every other icon isn't helping people build up experience in computer space.
I'm sure that some people don't need to decide whether to use the postal service or, say, FedEx. The shipping department decides for them. So, what is this person's goal when emailing a large attachment? "I want these other people to see this document. Computer, make it so." Could the computer not make a decision whether to email this as an attachment or for example, upload it somewhere and email a link? Sure that opens up a bunch of problems, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. And there are probably better ways to implement such a thing, but the idea is there.
Re:Article misses the point (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, a number of my users occassionally use loaner laptops for presentations, but they really do not "get" dual displays. Why does projector screen show something different than this screen? But I want to see presentation notes on the laptop screen but not the projector! More than once, these folks have been stuck in front of mostly technical audiences, unable to get their presentations going.
These same kind of people are the ones who want things to "just work" and who don't want to spend any time understanding how to operate the equipment. To combat this in a non confrontational manner, I'm pushing dual displays for a few users in the office. The hope is that we can increase a few people's productivity while simultaneously spreading understanding of the operation of dual displays throughout the office.
I'm also looking into methods to allow users who normally have a helpless mentality to figure out how to do certain tasks without extensive IT intervention. For example, we have a few people that we've had to walk through burning cds in xp multiple times. We've provided written instructions with variable success. I'm looking into getting screen capture/video software that would let us produce extremely easy to follow tutorials. The next time, a user asks for help burning a cd, we'll send them the tutorial first before visiting them for the nth time.
A lot of people get angry or embarassed when they have to ask for IT support. This is one of the main reasons people become adverse to learning about computers. If we can give people the ability or at least the illusion that they can help themselves, then they will be more open to learning in the future. A downloadable tutorial that they can follow by themselves and refer back to later gives people that sense of independent achievement.
Sometimes you have to do a salesman job. We've got a few users who refuse to abandon Eudora Pop mail clients. They refuse to switch to Outlook because they don't want to learn anything. So, without confronting them on this issue (yet) we've been doing things like introducing them to Webmail (OWA) and selling them on storing mail on the server (imap) all the while making it more and more desirable to switch to Outlook (or hell - anything other than Eudora). Of course, jumping through all these gradual transition hoops is a LOT of work for us. It would probably be more efficient for the business unit if we just kicked them into Outlook.
Anyways, the moral is there are a lot of subtle things you can do to improve the competency and confidence of your coworkers regardless of whether or not they want to learn.
Usability and education are *both* required (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you should, if you want to make sure that every time you click "send", your new mail really will "appear" in your friend's folder thingie.
> If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
If you don't know that "weight" is a property of matter under the force of a gravitational field, and why it's important to pilots, you're going to be frustrated when you exceed it.
Dialogue 1:
Airline: I'm sorry, we can't take the four of you, at 350 pounds apiece, plus your 200 pounds of luggage, in this Cessna.
Moron: Do you know who we are? We paid for our tickets. How dare you discriminate against us? You put us and our golfing equipment on that plane or I'll personally sue your airline into the ground!
Airplane: *crash*
(Granted, any pilot that lets such passengers board his aircraft deserves to crash with 'em. But the point is that an educated customer isn't going to be a moron, because they're going to be willing to listen to the error message "you weigh too much", and they're going to be capable of understanding it, and they're going to be able to take corrective action, by either taking two flights, by chartering a bigger aircraft, or by leaving some of their luggage behind.)
Similarly, if you don't know that "size" is a property of "files", and why it's important to sysadmins, you're going to be frustrated when you try to send big ones.
Dialogue 2:
Client: I'm sorry, I can't send that attachment to everyone in the company. It's way the hell too big.
Moron: This software sucks. Hey, sysadmin! I want to use a better mail software, the one you use! We make the sales this company relies on, and you answer to us! Either I get to email this DVD to my golfing buddy right now or your ass is fired!
Server: *crash*
Same problem. (And same comments about an admin who lets himself get browbeaten into blowing up his own server :)
There's a happy medium to be struck - but ultimately, it can't be solved only through clever UI design. Some user education is going to be required.
Computers have existed in the office for only 20 years, and have changed pretty radically over those 20 years. They're complex devices, and you have to understand at least some of what's going on under the hood to know what's common between a TRS-80, a Sun workstation, and an AMD64 running XP.
We had the same problem with automobiles in their first 20-30 years. The electrical starter, automatic choke, and the automatic transmission are about the only "new" UI developments for automobiles in the past 50 years. (The difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI.)
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.