Basic Principles of Learning Modern Technology

For some reason, my sleep has been a disaster area for weeks, which makes it challenging to finish good, well-thought-through, well-edited writing. I have completed most of a solid draft of the letter I had intended to publish this month, but it’s not at all ready to go.

My current intention is to finish it in the next few weeks, send it in May, and then do something different for July to return to my quarterly-ish schedule.

For today, here is a short one inspired by a conversation I had with someone this week.

1. Most UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) design is not unique. There’s a lot of overlap between what you can expect across software, including websites and smartphone apps. The most common tasks will usually be reachable from the main screen. Secondary tasks will usually be findable through a three-dot menu, a hamburger menu (three horizontal lines stacked), or something that resembles an arrow. This is not universally true, but pretty close. Search is often an option as well.

2. Software companies want you to be able to use what they create, and they have usually created documentation to help with that. Also, many people love to help by adding to that documentation for free. Written and video tutorials, Reddit threads, forum replies, and more will usually exist. If you Google it (or DuckDuckGo for the more privacy-minded), or look on YouTube, you’ll find information on how to do just about anything with any remotely common piece of software. You’ll also (usually) find out if the thing you want is impossible in a particular app, or if they’re working on implementing it.

   1. Sometimes you can ask a large-language model like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT and it will give you accurate information, but sometimes the results are plausible nonsense. It also doesn’t help you learn to search for your own answers, which you probably still have to do sometimes. But, in some cases, the search results in a normal search are themselves AI slop, and in that case, asking AI directly is often more effective. If I do, I like to ask it to cite its sources (which I can then check for myself). I do not typically use the “AI overview” and have turned it off in my browsers.

3. Almost all catastrophic changes come with a warning. We learn by doing, and especially by exploring, so if you’re too timid to click on things, it will be difficult to learn. Most applications, especially common software aimed at ordinary people, will ask you if you really want to delete all of your data. And even then, most deletions can be undone within a certain amount of time. Related: make backups where possible, or at least find out if they’re being made for you automatically.

4. We learn by doing! This is worth listing as its own principle. Whenever I tutor someone in tech skills, I try to have them do all the steps themselves, usually multiple times, to ensure they really remember. Do the steps. If it’s a task you’re likely to return to in the near future, repeat each step in the process until you’re certain you remember the whole thing. If you understand why these are the steps (e.g., all related tasks are grouped under this menu), you will remember it better.

5. User expectations seem to reflect reality most of the time. That includes yours. If an app is advertised to do something, there is a way to do it. If something is a natural extension of what it is advertised to do, there is probably either a way to do it or at least a workaround published online.

I know some people aren’t as good at learning from online tutorials, but sometimes you simply need to try a second or third tutorial. Or read the steps again. Pause a video at each step, and watch again if it helps.

Nobody’s watching you struggle with your technical task. If someone is watching you struggle and it makes you feel embarrassed, ask that person for help. You’ll either get help or find out that they don’t get it, either, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in either case.

You’re unlikely to break anything, so just try stuff, read the documentation, watch a video tutorial, ask someone to teach you. You’ll get it.

With physical machines, the principles are a bit different. I’m less mechanically inclined, and the design decisions for physical hardware are often less intuitive (to say the least), so here’s how I approach unfamiliar machines:

1. Read the manual. It’s easier to irrevocably break physical objects, so for unfamiliar hardware (printers, copy machines, microwaves that for some reason are also a convection oven) I’m much more likely to start by reading the manual. There is often a “quick start” guide for doing the most common tasks. If not, accept that it takes time to read all the steps.

2. See what is similar to something you’ve used before. I have expectations about how a printer works. Paper goes somewhere. Ink (or toner) gets refilled somewhere. Printers need electricity. They also need the actual data from the computer to know what to print, so they either need a physical wire or a wireless connection. And printed pages come out somewhere. If you break things down logically, you can usually at least get an idea of what to look for, what order to try things in, and what may or may not work.

3. Read the machine. Things tend to be labeled, often with words.

4. Try to do the easiest task that you need to do with it. This is the gentle, machine-targeted version of “learn by doing”. It’s the same, but more careful.

5. Don’t try to force anything to move in a way that it obviously isn’t. This tends to break things. Try another approach.

Printers can feel more frustrating because they tend to combine an unintuitive software interface with hardware that fails in peculiar ways if you think about it unkindly. But that’s what manuals, the internet, and customer service are for.

I’ll ask the Lord for wisdom for how to do what I need to do, if I can’t figure it out and I need to. And I’ve certainly prayed along the lines of, “please, Lord, let it work.” I trust God to give me what I need in order to do what He wants me to do, even if it’s a way to move forward with a printer spewing red toner all over my pages. (Sometimes the answer is really to use someone else’s printer.)

I think all I’ve worked on much writing-wise recently was a Substack letter, and I still didn’t manage to publish that one. I’m just exhausted, and writing is the kind of work that is difficult for my brain to do when it won’t work well. But at least I got this little one out!

That’s it for this April! I intend to send at least a good July letter to maintain a quarterly-ish schedule, and probably my other, unfinished one before then.

If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:

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To truth, love, and adventure,

Rae

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