When it comes to MY mom, online has to come to her and be simple, or she has better things to do. She’s in her 70s. She’s busy. She has a low tolerance for distraction. Same as lots of moms.

Some other folks’ moms don’t speak English and aren’t so comfortable with UIs that are anything other than way intuitive. If we want to say accomodating (as in good intuitive UIs) instead of simple (simpleton users), that’d probably be good too.

Perhaps it’s more generational; perhaps it’s that being a mom is as DEMANDING as it gets, but I don’t agree we need to throw the baby (as it were) out with the bathwater where technology SOLVING THE PROBLEMS moms have is concerned.

“So easy even a mom could do it” = wrong.

“So easy even my mom would want to bother” = true in many cases.

“Such a good UI that even people whose first language is NOT the resident language of the applications can use it with ease (mom or not)” = even better.

My two cents

I hope I’ve changed these stereotypes in the minds of my students. I think this “helpless housewife” stigma is left over from the mid 1950’s and wasn’t even correct then. Thank you for bringing attention to it!

In my opinion, this really has less to do with being able to understand, and more to do with being able to remember what you’ve previously understood.

This is really *really* important when you’ve piled the abstractions four or five deep, and they’re starting to leak.

This is also why I like Python: it fits my brain better because there is less pointless syntax that I have to remember. I never could keep all the ‘public static void main’ and arbitrary curly braces from java in my head. It just wouldn’t stick.

No one says that anymore, because the stereotype has shifted: kids often pick up cutting-edge technology faster than their grown-up counterparts.

Usually you hear “it’s so easy even my mom can do it” in the context of technology. The implication isn’t that Mom is stupid, the implication is that Technology is confusing and complicated. The statement makes more of a stereotype about the poor UI of modern tech than of the higher brain functions of aging people.

So, why Mom? Why not Dad, Grandma or Gramps? Actually I’ve heard all of those, so I’m not convinced that Mom is being singled out here.

Me, I don’t refer to my Mom as the paragon of tech-illiteracy, because she isn’t. I say “it’s so easy my Grandma could do it — and she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to insert a tape into a VCR”. Which is true. My grandma is a very smart woman, mind you, she just tends to have trouble using her entire brain when anything with electricity is involved
I suspect others do likewise, referring to someone who, for them personally, is not all that good with technology. The position in the family tree will vary.

As long as we’re thinking intelligence is tied to gender, in either direction, we’re not doing the right thing.

Personally, *my* Mom is perfectly capable of understanding complex technology, she just doesn’t have any interest in doing so. It isn’t lack of ability or knowledge, it’s impatience with pointless complexity.

I (and most other folks, I think) have some of the same attitude, we just don’t all apply it to the same degree or to the same subjects.

For example, I find it very hard to remember which wash-cycle goes with which clothes. It just pops right back out of my head. I guess I just subconciously expect the washer to figure it out itself, or for the washer to at least have a UI with buttons that match those cryptic little emblems on the clothing tags.

Those of us in the tech industry often forget just how much complexity we’ve memorized, and how leaky the abstractions are that we use to gloss over the complexity, and we *certainly* forget how pointless much of that complexity is.

(not just ‘pointless in appearance to the uninitiated’, but truly pointless in fact)

Example: email clients *never* ask me where I want to save a message I’m writing, or sending, or have received, not even a draft-in-progress. Why does my word-processor ask me that for every single document?

Is it any wonder people outside the industry find it difficult to learn and remember this stuff, when the details of the most basic operations of a mainstream application are entirely arbitrary and have no real point (in many cases, not even uniformity)?

As an industry, we simply *must* do better.

I think Jeneane is right that there are ways of using your personal experience with people close to you (not just your mother, please!) that don’t necessarily call upon stereotypes of older women. But if you just say “make it easy enough for my mom to use” without telling us anything about your mom, that’s resorting to a stereotype. The listeners probably don’t know your mom so all they can do is imagine a generic idea of a woman from the earlier generation.

I have met plenty of older men who didn’t know how to use computers (like CEO types who have secretaries do it for them) and plenty of older women who did (some of them the secretaries working for those older men).

In 50 years, the whole Mom stereotype will be dead, as the young girls today are a lot more computer savvy.

I hate to say it but the majority of women (that I know) over the age of 50 aren’t very adept at working a UI, and I don’t think they ever will be, no matter how “easy to use” we make the stuff. It’s just not fun to them.

Do we really have to play Martin Luther King on this issue?