When everyone else arrives
A thought.
Most people don’t use the Web. A large majority (80% plus) of planet Earth are not online. One of the reasons for this, maybe not the main reason, but certainly a substantial reason, is that computers in their current form are simply too complex and require too much investment of attention to be useful to these people. They are not interested in simultaneously having a computer experience doing useful tasks and managing that computer experience (opening windows, moving things about, managing apps, maintaining security, wrangling updates, etc.). Not because they aren’t clever enough, just because doing things on a computer still involves too much computer to be useful to them.
The Apple iPad could possibly be the first main-stream device to successfully push past this “too much computer” bottleneck and present a new paradigm in interacting with data and functionality. Certainly, a strong argument can be made that this could be the case. Will others follow if this proves to be the case? Certainly. Will their subsequent attempts outdo Apple’s products? Could well be. The important bit is the paradigm shift itself, rather than which particular company is driving it.
So, let’s say Apple (for the sake of argument) does create this shift and makes computers useful for people who are currently uninterested. Their expectation of how a computer works will be based on this new paradigm, which will be fundamentally different in a few or many ways to the existing one.
Let’s also say that the number of users who come to exist within this paradigm far outnumber the users who exist in the “currently interested” paradigm. The numbers certainly suggest this is a possibility.
So.
What does the Web need to become to fit this new paradigm? How many of the design and functional norms that currently exist are children of the “currently useful” paradigm and simply not applicable in the new one?
Has web design up until this point been aimed at a skewed, early-adopter demographic and we haven’t really noticed?
And, if this is the case, what happens to us when everyone else arrives?
I think we must consider that about 80% of the world’s population lives on less than $10/day. So a large portion of the non-users are non-users because of poverty. It will take a long time before any form of computering/the shift makes it to the majority of these people.
Of course this is true, hence my point about a lack of usefulness not being the main reason for the lack of computer/web use. The gap between biggest reason and second biggest reason is definitely massive.
But I think it is still the case that the vast majority of even those people who do have access want a better, simpler less “computery” computing experience and will embrace it given the option. And as more and more people do gain access to this technology, that demographic split will probably be maintained.
So we, as creators and managers of web content and functionality, should be prepared to adapt to whatever results from that. Just what that might be? I don’t have much of an idea, but it should be really interesting finding out.
I like your thinking. Not relating to the billions of people in developing countries, more in relation to people like me and my mum.
It’s easy for people working with computers every day, to think that working them is easy. But even for someone like me has problems – my computer at home is a disaster because I don’t have an IT team to look after it, and really don’t fancy spending the time to fart (I that’s the right technical term) around with it to make it work better.
Apple has been at the forefront of commoditising technology for years and the iPad is no different.
Commoditising of technology is a process that all successful inventions go through if they last long enough. People who were around for the birth of the car, radio, television etc will testify that when these things appeared you had to know how it worked in order to work it. No longer. The only downside of this process is that it generally renders the objects disposable – Apple are also quite good at that.
So the same will certainly soon be true if the common desktop computer. It can’t come soon enough for me and millions of others like me.
JJ