Masters of Yelp-Fu

This year, I was home for the holidays for the first time since starting an internet startup (FamilyLeaf). I found myself noticing how my family uses the computer — what they work with skillfully, and what they struggle with.

Mom is solid at responding to emails on Yahoo, and she’s a good typist. She’s great at browsing furniture online, and always has several tabs open to e-commerce pages. But Facebook is completely unintuitive to her — she has 12 friends and has never added a profile photo. Only the Phone and Messages apps on her iPhone get any sort of use, she’s never used Maps or Mail (let alone Instagram or Yelp). Her Yahoo-Fu and Amazon-Fu are solid, her Facebook-Fu and iPhone-Fu is non-existent.

Grandpa is terrific with Excel, much better than myself. But he struggles trying to read India Abroad in his browser. His Excel-Fu is professional, his Firefox-Fu is zero. My little brother (8 years old) has an iPad and Angry-Birds-Fu, but no Typing-Fu.

Using software really is a tangible skill that must be exercised and developed. You get better, on an application-specific level, through direct practice. It all has a learning curve, and the learning curves are completely divided between products.

I frequently hear the assumption that the “iPad is perfect for grandparents.” If you get an iPad for Grandpa, he’ll be able to read the New York Times and look at baby photos perfectly within a few hours of starting. It’s reinforced by Apple’s ads and our own buying behavior (hell, we bought ours an iPad this Christmas).

But if Grandpa has a tiny bit of computer experience at all (composing documents, checking email), I’d guess that the iPad would be more difficult for him to use than you’d expect. If you put in the same amount of teaching time, he’d find it much easier to read the morning newspaper on a Windows laptop.

Grandma, on the other hand, won’t even get near a computer. But she loves books and we spent time preloading her gift Kindle — with our help, she has a solid amount of Kindle-Fu.

When we design websites and software, keep in mind that our users might not have Yelp-Fu. Only I and a few others open Yelp several times a day to find a drugstore or food spot in the city. Your users probably have a good amount of Google-Fu, and maybe some great Word-or-Excel-Fu, but they didn’t when they started using those apps. You’re starting from ground zero (and so is everyone else).

I might not be fully correct here. But I bet there are a ton of shiny iPads sitting untouched in our grandparents’ houses.