I am not a Luddite. As I have pointed out to my students, I used computers when they still needed punch cards. But I am also old enough to remember a time when the stuff you bought actually worked the way it was supposed to, on the first try.
Now I am stuck in a Beta world. Nothing ever works and solutions are crowd-sourced from customers.
Millennials don't get it.
It shouldn't take an hour and a half to schedule a Covid booster appointment three weeks from now.
A recent story from Joanna Jones founder of InterQ sums the problem up neatly. "A major social-media company thought it had developed a killer app because people were spending so much time tapping and scrolling around the page. But it turned out they were spending so much time on the page because they couldn't figure out how to get off of it." (Murphy, 2021)
It reminds me of a story from AirBnb. After the Millennials who founded the site realized that their hosts tended to be Baby Boomers who were struggling to use it, they had a "Bring your mom to work day." I wish everyone would do that.
Meanwhile though 12.2 million Americans have already quit their jobs this fall. Boomer retirements which were running about 1 million a year, have accelerated in the past two years to 3.5 million. And, 50.3% of those 55+ are now retired. (Fry, 2021)
Don't count on them coming back. As the saying goes - "You broke it, you own it."
Murphy, K. (202, May 23) Why Companies Shouldn't Give Up on Focus Groups. wsj.com. Retrieved December 21, 2021, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/focus-groups-big-data-companies-11621604085
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