thoughtcrumbs

Web expertise comes from collaboration, not hours

Most web-related experiments I've seen include an initial survey, asking how many hours per week participants spend online, or playing games, or checking email. And other than the most cursory review, these surveys rarely inform the experimental design. For some of their recent studies, the members of the Fidelity Investments Human Interface Design group developed a different kind of survey, asking people to identify the function of common web icons, such as the back button, the shopping cart, and the SSL lock. They later found a strong correlation between web task performance and the survey score, indicating that it was, in fact, a better indicator of web expertise than raw hours online.

So, that much is obvious. However, they further compared "hours" to "expertise" for different age groups and found that older adults who had logged the same amount of time online as younger users still performed worse in web studies. Rather than immediately attributing the difference to motor or cognitive processing issues, they looked at collaborative learning. Office workers and students have ample opportunity to learn web tricks from people around them. (I recently learned Ctrl + Scrolling down on the mouse wheel increases font size.) The older adults in the study reported being more isolated and thus had fewer chances to glean tricks through this "rubbing off."