A few days ago I was walking back from lunch in downtown Seattle when I overheard the women behind me talking about the Microsoft Kinect. One of the women was talking about how her young daughter "jumped right in" using the device, without having to be told much about how it works. She was also talking about how after almost a month she still has problems using it. "I don't know how she can be so good at it and I'm so terrible," the woman asked her friend.
They grew up with it, duh
This isn't anything new, and as you can probably guess the friend replied, "Kids are just better at this stuff because they've grown up with it." This is a pretty standard response whenever someone younger than you figures out some new-fangled technology that you can't. But is it really true? This little girl didn't "grow up" with the Kinect, it's only been available to the public for about six months. Sure, she did very likely grow up in the age of consumer electronics, but none of them use the natural human interface that the Kinect does, and even non-standard (i.e. buttons, mice, keyboards, control sticks) input methods are fairly new. Apple's multi-touch devices have only been around for three and a half years, and Nintendo's Wii is only a year older. I will admit that three to four years is a long time for a little kid, but even with that much exposure to similar (although still very different) devices I don't buy the whole "They've just grown up with it" rationale.
Some say tech, it is a river...
Technology is a constantly evolving monster. It doesn't exist in nicely posed snapshots until the next big thing comes out and replaces it. New things are released to augment the existing tech until companies can afford to push the next big thing into production. Upgrades and add-ons and accessories. All of these things make learning technology a constantly moving target. For example, it's very likely that your iPhone today doesn't just do the things it did last week, thanks to new apps, new accessories or new software updates pushed by Apple or app developers. This makes me think that just because the stuff existed doesn't make "they grew up with it" a very valid explanation. You don't just know everything about technology that is produced while you're under a certain age. There's another explanation that fits much better. Kids are more creative than you are.
It's all about Imagination
I don't know about you, but I've spent at least 24 of my 28 years being told what is not possible, what not to do because it's "weird" or "different", and just generally having people in positions of authority closing doors and building walls around my imagination. I'm talking about parents, teachers, and peer pressure, all slowly pushing us toward the norms and mores of our societies It's probably the same way with you, give or take a few years depending on your age. We've constructed these ideas of "normal" because it makes things work better when everyone has more or less the same expectations of common people and things where they live. We can all agree that a red light means stop, and that generally a person on the street that waves at you is just saying hi.
Little kids don't have that inhibition yet. They don't know all the rules, so they just make stuff up as it makes sense to them. They let their imaginations fill in the gaps in their understanding of the world because it's all they have to fall back on. Their minds aren't programed to see a TV screen and immediately think "passive viewing experience," they talk back to the characters, interact with them. If you don't believe me watch an episode of anything made for kids aged two to five and see how many pauses for audience participation there are. So of course it makes sense that waving at the TV makes things happen, that jumping up and down makes you on the screen jump up and down. Why wouldn't it? The idea of the TV seeing you isn't more familiar to a child, it's just less impossible. Why wouldn't the TV see you, you can see it? It's only fair. This is how it is for most new technology, and why kids learn it faster. They don't have to unlearn the old things.
So what...?
The absence of preconceptions is what makes kids better at new technology than adults, because it's not "weird" to them that it's not like anything else. As experience designers we need to keep this idea in mind when designing new and possibly "weird" things, but we also need to try and reinvigorate the imaginations of our users. It's possible but you have to prime the pump, so to speak, and get the user into the mindset that "this is unlike anything else." Once you can do that, imagine what other ideas these newly freed users, including you, will think up?
