There's some technical blindness that comes with PC use. While people can navigate complex situations fine by talking to humans, put them in front of a user interface and they can't tell an affordance from a hole in the ground. They're not dumb people, they just spent all their time interfacing with humans instead of with computers, so when faced with a technical challenge they don't really know how to start.
I think part of that contrast is in face to face situations, the person on the other side knows inside and out what needs to be done as part of their job. You can call a hotel with zero knowledge on how to book a room, and the concierge will hold your hand and walk you through the process until you have a room booked.
Even online chat support is pretty lackluster and puts a lot of work on the user. At an old job of mine, IT wouldn't even mess around with trying to troubleshoot a ticket going back and forth chatting or emailing. They'd just remote in to your workstation and fix the problem, same thing a concierge at a hotel would do with their keyboard and mouse rather than you struggling through booking on hotels.com and managing an online chat.
There are, but based on the limited information, I remain skeptical of the study.
The example of a difficult task was to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email message”. Many of the other examples given are email related tasks.
If you meter and study Office app use, you’ll find that features like this are rarely invoked. For the example above, Where I have studied behavior on significant user populations, I would guess that 5% of users book a meeting room resource in any 30 day period, and only 2-3% do so more than once in a 30 day period. The numbers will vary in some populations, but usually you see 80% of the booking done by a small number of people (managers and admins).
The problem with this is that the study is looking at a narrow range of office worker tasks and applying them to the public at large. It’s an assessment of MS Office skill sets across the population, not ability to perform complex tasks.
There may be more depth in the paywalled study, but this article didn’t surface it.
Right, but if you give that task to pretty much anyone here, they'd nail it no prob. Even if they had to do it in Thunderbird or GCal instead of Outlook. Heck, I'm sure I could manage it in Lotus 1-2-3. I don't think reliance on office software or oddness of the task is in question -- and if you're saying it's due to unfamiliarity with the software, well, that's still very bad news for all the software writers out there.
(I'm sure you've met people who are the inverse.)