Introduction

You’ve been using a Macintosh for years. You know all the keyboard shortcuts. You can find the Easter eggs hidden in your software. You scoff at Internet Explorer. You even know a few tricks in the Terminal. In other words, you are the resident Mac expert. While you may bask in the reputation you also get asked the most exasperating questions, questions that anyone should be born knowing, or so it seems the fourth time you’ve told Fred that he has to optimize his 5 megapixel digital camera shots before he emails them to you, tying up your connection for a week. Yeah, but isn’t it a great camera.

Or maybe you stare in horror at Ethyl as she’s telling you how she just changed her user name by boting into OS 9 and renamed her Jaguar hard disk partition because she didn’t like the “short name” that Apple stuck her with. You know that she has just thrown a huge monkey wrench into her system and are thinking of places you can hide for the next three months. Make that six months and throw in a handful of Tylenol to be safe.

Have you ever wondered at the kind of mistakes people make? That’s other people, of course. You don’t make major mistakes. You occasionally have to spend a few hours, uh, exploring your system after a particularly clever experiment. Yeah, me too.

As an instructor at a university computer lab and president of a Mac User Group (MUG), Fred and Ethyl have made themselves well know to me. So have Lucy and Ricky and Will and Grace and their dogs and cats and third cousins, twice removed. The experience has been both enlightening and humbling.

First off, knowing how to use a computer has little to do with knowing how to offer computer related advice. To judge by many of the explanations I hear in group help sessions, this is seldom understood or appreciated. Helping someone entails an obligation. You have to be willing to meet the questioner in more or less the same place in which she resides with her knowledge.

Five Stages of Computer Competence

Fred, with his new computer and digital camera is thrilled to be able to connect daily with his granddaughter. He’s actually a good photographer, but the computer is a foreign invader in his life, one that speaks a different language and makes incomprehensible demands on him. He knows that somehow his iMac has to potential to open more doors for him but right now he’s ready to throw it through the window.

Ethyl is fearless in her exploration. She wants to know everything there is to know about her TiBook. She’s been using Office for years, can compose a Word document or Excel spreadsheet in her sleep. But she hates to read the manual. It just takes too much time. And Macs are supposed to be intuitive anyway, aren’t they? And look at this, you can do all sorts of stuff in 9 that OS X won’t let you do, like renaming your partitions. She just doesn’t have time for permissions anyway. Mother always told her that permission were for the other guy.

And there you are having to deal with both the fearful and the fearless. Like a couple of hints? What I’ve found is the first thing to do when dealing with a new computer problem is assess the user first. Too technical an explanation will overwhelm a beginner. A too simple one will bore the experienced. Either way everyone loses. So it may help to think of people as progressing through a continuum of, say, five stages. Each stage requires a different approach. Some will be easier for you, as a coach, to deal with. Others will make you think of tall bridges and buildings and high up place to exit them, or maybe just a couple dozen stiff drinks. I mean right now, bartender.

Stage 1: Fear and trembling in Macland

Stage one people are afraid of their computers. This is essential to remember. Kids go through this stage in about five minutes. Without help, their grandparents may spend the rest of their lives here. They may be afraid that they’ll never be able to learn computers. Or they think that they will break something, anything, by doing anything at all. Of course it’s that very fear that keeps them from learning but it doesn’t help to say so. This is a handholding stage. Your main job is to reassure, forget every bit of jargon you ever learned and reach deep into your well of patience.

Regardless of the stated problem the real concern is that they are afraid of their computers and just don’t get the way they behave. A major breakthrough may come when your student (it’s really helpful to think of people at this stage as students) realizes that Appleworks and Eudora both have the same ‘Print ‘command in the same ‘File’ menu. Your job then is mostly to say, “Yeah, isn’t that neat.” This is baby step country and will always be so until enough confidence is built to allow Fred to graduate to the next level.

Stage 2: Just follow the recipe

People in stage two have gotten past the fear factor and can use their Macs constructively. However, their knowledge is generally confined to a few specific applications. They can work the programs but haven’t yet gotten their minds into the computer groove.

For my aging Mother, this may be as far as she ever gets. That’s alright. We can email each other and play cribbage on Yahoo Games even though we live 1200 miles apart.

Learning new programs will bring back a bit of the old familiar first stage fear but there’s enough comfort to make productive use of the box. Working with these people it helps to be very clear and move through explanations step by small step, like, okay, look up in the upper left hand corner. See the word File? If you click on it,

that’s right, move your mouse like that, and so on. If you watch how they’re responding they’ll generally be able to learn. Remember to KISS, though.

People in the later days of stage two can surprise you. They may even be using some major programs. This can often be a gotcha. Recently, I helped a guy at work who uses Photoshop, Excel, Word and GoLive almost daily. I went in assuming that he had a more general computer understanding than he really does. After working with him awhile I had to do a major backtrack, explaining some basic Mac stuff that I had assumed he knew. He only knew enough to use his programs in a narrow way but didn’t yet understand the logic of them or the OS. It’s an easy mistake to make so be careful and always remember the assessment phase.

Stage 3: Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.

Graduating to stage three is often a gradual process. Ricky realizes that because he can use Appleworks, when he has to use Word while visiting his brother, he can kind of bang around and get something done. He has learned that well designed programs follow common patterns and that knowing the general patterns makes using the individual programs easier. He’s comfortable doing what he needs to do and can generally pick up new applications or tricks easily enough. Ricky is easy to coach. However, he expects your respect when you coach him. Compared to a beginner, he is an expert and will probably get upset if you are the least bit condescending.

My personal problem is that people here generally learn one way to do things and I have to bite my tongue to keep from offering ‘helpful hints’. If Ricky really wanted the hints, he would have moved on to the next stage.

Remember to respect his hard won knowledge and realize that his way may not be the most efficient but it does work for him. Sure you or I could do the same thing faster but that doesn’t matter. It works for Ricky. If he wants hints, let him ask.

Stage 4: Hey! This is fun.

Ethyl has moved into stage four, in many ways the most dangerous phase. She is no longer afraid of her computer. In fact, she actively seeks out new ways to do things, new keyboard shortcuts, terminal hacks from a forum, or (be afraid, be very afraid) system customization. She may dive into her Extensions folder and throw away things she thinks she doesn’t need or break into OS X through a backdoor and totally screw things up. This is a heady stage, where the power and fun of a computer, not as a game console, but as a cool thing in itself becomes apparent. It’s also a time when fools rush in where system administrators fear to tread. It’s a lot of fun to coach these people. There is a lot of, “Hey, look at this.” There is a lot of learning taking place, a lot of excitement and your job is often to be the voice of reason, caution and the harpy of regular backups.

In stage one, you need to convince people that they can’t break the computer. Stand up, raise your right hand and repeat after me, “I cannot break the computer. I cannot break the computer.” Not at stage four. Expect major screw-ups. You are both on the Mac team now. You can set a ‘good practices’ example. That may even be your most important task. This is a kind of teenage period where Ethyl will test the limits. And, yes, she will break things. She’s supposed to now. Her experiments are mandatory. She is a power user. She should be proud of herself and she is about to learn that old adage, “There are two kinds of computer users, those who have lost all their data and those who will.” And boy can she throw some bizarre problems your way.

Stage 5: Dancing with Mastery

I don’t think people so much graduate to the next level as gain wisdom from too many half baked attempts to do something they should not have. Yes, computers are wonderful and they are evil, contrary and out to get you. Detect a little paranoia here? Absolutely. Lose a major portion of a big project, just once and you’ll join me in the paranoid realm. We have spent fruitless hours tracking down glitches. You may have installed web programs to find that you have dependencies to your dependencies to your dependencies and that the OS X directory system isn’t the same as the Linux one you have instructions for.

Computers are like wild carnivores, (it’s probably no coincidence that OS X is currently named Tiger), wonderful, magnificent even, but never to be complacent around. You don’t coach experts but learn from them or share with them, peer to peer. It was your joy of learning more about your Mac that got you to the place you are. More fool you, if you play know-it-all. You share your expertise in one area and learn from others in theirs because you’ve also realized that nobody can keep up except in a narrow field. There are always questions you just can’t answer. And that’s a good thing.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 11:34 am and is filed under Best Practices, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.