A shift in learning >> user interfaces
- Paul
- May 4, 2024
- 4 min read
I am in my mid-50s. My generation has been in a unique position to witness the explosion of personal technology.
When we were born, we passed our time with wooden and plastic toys, real paper books, and a television with about 5 channels that played programming you had to plan to watch at a particular time during the week. At that time, the TV was the feared emerging technology that parents felt should be limited. So I could only watch 2 hours of TV per day. These things were sometimes inspiring, but often not inspiring enough. So we spent a lot of time going to our friends' houses, riding bikes, doing sports, or getting lost in the forest...sometimes injuring ourselves.
We communicated over distance with a telephone on the wall that did not tell you who was calling. And it was not your own. It was used by your entire family.
In the 90s there was an initial boom in personal technology in the form of the personal computer. You also had a personally owned mobile phone for the first time. But let's skip past this minor boom and move on to the major one we are in now.
The smartphone. Now we all have a super computer, personally owned and private to us, that fits in our pocket...and we take it with us at all times...even to the bathroom. Thanks to the internet, it has access to any person, or piece of human learning, regardless of time or distance. And it is continuously evolving with new functionality in the form of apps.
Because of the explosion in personal technology, many many things have changed about our lives. And this could be the subject of dozens of essays. But in this post, I just want to focus on one: learning.
In my youth, I don't remember having to learn a user interface. The index of a book? The card catalog at the library? Reading sheet music? I don't consider those interfaces because there was no interactivity. Maybe learning to drive a car was one of the first major experiences of an interactive UI. The speedometer, the gas gauge, the steering wheel, the pedals...the risk of losing your life.
In my youth, learning was two things: learning skills and learning facts.
These days I feel like more than half of learning is learning a UI. Once you've learned the UI, you can just do things without possessing the skill or factual knowledge. Think of Excel. If you know how to use Excel, you don't need to be a math genius.
These days we are inundated with UIs. You've got your personal smartphone to learn. You have your personal computer and work computer. The operating system, the business apps like Outlook and Word. The chat apps like WhatsApp and Slack.
If you are into gaming, you learn your PlayStation menus along with the user interfaces for the various games you play...and the physical controls for those games. This could be 2, 4, 10 new games a year depending on what kind of gamer you are. And maybe you game on PlayStation and Switch and Steam? This is no small feat to learn all these controls.
As a hobby, I make music with hardware and software synthesizers. Each has it's own menus, buttons, and sliders. And I assemble all the sounds and performances on my studio software which is extremely deep in functionality. I have used it for 10 years and I have only explored about 10% of the jungle that is Logic Pro X. This is no exaggeration.
Learning UI in this way has slowly become a part of my life. It did not happen overnight. So this shift in learning was not top of mind for me until recently.
I consider myself to be pretty good at learning new things including new UI with business apps, gaming, and music-making tools. BUT! I recently got interested in learning 3D modeling and motion graphics. And I began dabbling in Blender which is a free software package to do these things.
It is hard to understate how insanely difficult - meaning complex - this endeavor is. Music making has a lot of tools, but in the end you don't have to be a master of them all. If you can use one tool - even poorly - that improves the sound of your music, that is good enough. 3D modeling and animation is at least 10 times more difficult than music making. My brain is fried after watching a tutorial for 10 minutes. By the way, my Mac is also fried. I literally need to upgrade to a better computer to do this new hobby.
So thank you 3D modeling for making me realize this shift in learning from skills and facts to user interfaces.
(To state the obvious, this just underscores how pervasive software has become in our everyday lives compared to 40 years ago.)
If you have followed and agreed with my narration of the shift in learning, there are some questions to consider:
How will the learning of facts (scientific truths, history, legal precedent, mathematical constants, etc.) fare as we spend more time learning about the UI (modern tools) we need to use?
Is skill earning still alive and well? Have we just shifted from doing (writing, calculating, memorizing) to mastering the tools that replace doing?
And perhaps the most interesting question: will the shift to learning tools (UI), mean we will lost the ability to operate without tools or limited tools? What if our UI tool goes off line? Are we more depended on tools? I don't know.
As for myself, I like things that technology has allowed me to do with music or visual creation. So I will learn the new UI as long as I can. I also respect the people who prefer to create without these new tools. Maybe these old school folks will be more appreciated in the future for their ability to do it without the software.
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