I think a major difference is also that for the teens of today, these apps are intuitive, if they are well designed. They take like 20 seconds to figure everything out. It is just us oldies who grew up with mouse and keyboard who have these problems.
It's always been recognition over recollection. Users don't want to learn how the computer works. They just want to get to their desired solution as quick as possible. So they'll pay attention long enough to learn the correct sequence of buttons to push that achieves that then stop there. Any change to that mechanical process, no matter how innate to the UI it is, will be seen as a disruption.
I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life.
Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding.
The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.
A lot of what he says resonates with me. Except the bit about computers needing to be difficult to encourage learning. That's the adversity-builds-character mindset that I disagree with. The computer I learned to hack on was a Macintosh IIsi. It wasn't bare metal like a 8-bit computer that booted into BASIC. Nor finicky with lots of arcane configurations like a Windows 3.1 machine (and I've used both of those as well). It had all the it just works plug-and-play that he laments in Windows 7 but as a curious kid with a hacker mentality it served me just fine. Enough that by the time I graduated from it I was modifying the System with hooks written in 680x0 assembly.
But the author really goes wrong, I believe, in his conclusion that the cause of digital literacy is served by forcing users to be gurus. This is entirely wrong and is the crux of the observation I made above. There is a myth in UX development that programmers are targeting a conceptual user that exists somewhere on a continuous slope between novice and power user. The article ends with suggesting that computers be taught by setting people onto this theoretical path. (And to be honest I think he's mistaken that this isn't what we've already been doing and shown to not be effective.) But what if that path doesn't exist? Then trying to teach anyone that way will be fruitless.
My thought is that there is no gradual progression. Most people are not going to be able to learn computers the way that you and I have. So they need different ways of using computers than what we are used to. And that will mean a lot of disruptive ideas, which we may be suspicious of and call it "dumbing down". But what we should be more skeptical of is our own assumptions.
So if average people want to learn computers differently than nerds do, what we certainly don't want is to cut off the paths of discovery that lead to the next generation of super users, hackers, and developers. Both ways need to be preserved and encouraged to allow average users to get the most benefit of technology, while encouraging the more in-depth learning by those who want to be more deeply involved.
But they aren't. There is a language nowadays but it isn't nearly as consistent, and corrupted by so many dark patterns. Hamburger menu or three dots? Is this circle with color filled in activated or disabled? Is that a button/link or is it flavor?
