31st
#MondayMusings — My Very Best Focus Group
At dinner with an old colleague, I described my two-year-old’s iron grip on technology: Meg is completely comfortable and capable navigating an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad.
This is to say she can:
- choose, locate and launch a desired application across any number of separate home screens (aka SpringBoard);
- organize applications within a folder or nesting inside and among folders or across multiple home screens;
- quick-switch among open applications;
- identify, locate and start rich media content from within an application (e.g., NetFlix, iTunes, Videos, etc.);
- increase, decrease or mute the volume of audio, and
- close an application.
With respect to the YouTube application in particular, she is by any reasonable yardstick the most facile user of the iPad app I have ever seen—regardless of age.
This is all very impressive for any child, but especially so for a kid who is now 29 months old.
Most interesting is that she has a very different relationship with technology compared to her two sisters, who are 7 and 5 years old. For my youngest, she expects that all screens are touchable. The phone is touchable. The music player is touchable and so is the tablet.
So why not the laptop?
Or the TV?
These new devices have disintermediated the mouse and keyboard, but the modern tablet computer has been around as long as she can remember.
The iPad YouTube application’s controls are complex but usable to my toddler. The TV remote control is a foreign object.
The two-year-old also has the expectation of always-accessible content. She usually uses our Wi-Fi iPad inside the house. When we took a road trip and brought the iPad along, she had no patience, or appreciation, that videos Daddy pre-loaded were available but NetFlix streaming content wasn’t.
To her, content is content, and should always be available, geography, or wireless technology be damned.
The expression of frustration may differ, but the root anxiety is the same. The frustration she expresses as a tantrum is at the root of a more mature user’s depiction that the device may be buggy or sluggish.
In this way, my toddler provides me, at least for now, the most readily accessible focus group of all. If computing works for her, it works for everybody.
