A little gamification can be good sometimes
To be clear, I'm not suggesting this post's title is some sort of hot-take...
Gamification can be a great educational strategy. Have you ever had to help an older relative use a computer, or any piece of technology?
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Sometimes your relatives don't want to learn how to fish. They don't have time to learn. They need you to give them a fish right now, because they have an appointment in a half hour and their day is booked and they just don't have time to deal with it. Maybe, they say, you can teach me fishing later.
Well, later can mean decades. After all that time, the most they might accomplish is the ability to waddle into shallow water and directly grab a minnow with their hands. They've rebuffed your attempts to give them a boat, fishing rod, and bait, so the larger fish remain out of reach. Or maybe they're still at a point where, for each and every fish in the lake they intend to catch, they expect a set of written, step-by-step instructions on how to swim to that fish's specific location.
Everyone's family is different so I'll try not to generalize too much. But if you're reading this blog, you've probably had at least some frustrating experiences in your life trying to teach your relatives how to use a computer. I've had my share.
Basic computing tasks aren't actually that difficult, but even the simplest interface can be incredibly challenging to use without the right intuition and muscle memory. Tutorials are important because they allow you to develop those skills in a friendly, controlled environment, often independent of the tasks they're preparing you for.
An older relative of mine got a good deal on a new TV last winter, an LG, and requested my help in setting it up and teaching them how to use the interface. Until then, on their older TV, I had encouraged them to only use the Comcast cable box's UI. This wasn't going to work anymore, since they wanted to use the TV's built in apps to watch certain shows only available on streaming services. Like many smart TVs, the LG's remote functions as a wiimote-style pointer. LG's webOS interface isn't that difficult to understand; the main hurdle we had to deal with was developing the hand-eye coordination they needed to comfortably use the pointer on a daily basis.
There are really only two tasks a user needs to learn: pointing, and selecting items, which is done by pressing the center button while the pointer hovers over a UI control. I performed an initial demonstration of this, but there was still the question of how they would go about practicing it. I find that, depending on the relative, sitting down and hand-holding them through a set of prescribed example tasks can be tedious at best and, in the worst case, end in a stupid argument if one of us gets too frustrated with the other.
An alternative would be to forgo a structured approach and let them wander around the UI as a means of practicing. Doing this before they've become used to using the pointer runs the risk of them inadvertently pressing a button or control which does something disruptive. That might mean changing a setting which breaks something, or entering a screen on a poorly designed app they have trouble exiting out of, or buying or subscribing to something by mistake. It's unnecessary stress for them and more work for me to fix.
I took a third approach: I wrote a small interactive webpage and bookmarked it to their TV's home screen:
All this does is place a large dot somewhere on the page. The object of the game is, obviously, to increase your score by hovering over the dot and pressing the remote's center button. The dot disappears, a point is awarded, and a new dot appears with a random diameter and position. To add some difficulty, the average dot diameter becomes progressively smaller until reaching a lower bound.Pressing these dots is trivial on a PC or phone... It's a bit harder with a TV remote, and if you're older and unaccustomed to an interface like this.
For some added visual feedback, I change the background color when a dot is successfully pressed. I deliberately avoided including feedback when the background is pressed. Given the binary choice between the dot (success) and the background (failure), the lack of feedback is negative feedback.
Keep in mind this was originally designed to be seen on a large 16:9 TV. The TV's browser, a full-screen app who's controls take up minimal screen real estate, is an ideal controlled environment, minimizing the kinds of mistakes I mentioned earlier.
This little endeavor ended up working fantastically, and was well worth the short time I spent writing it. My relative quickly got the hang of pointing and selecting items on their TV, and not once have I been summoned back to help them use the remote. In fact, I've had practically no family-tech-support calls for this TV since then. If that's not success, I don't know what is!