Friends of my generation who weren’t in families with a computer they could play around on have ended up far less comfortable with tech. I would love to see data like this broken out by class background.
I suspect companies have historically been overvalued based on what a techie user could get out of them rather than their intended user. Does this happen with phone apps too?
Are there modes of instruction that help people advance in these skills? They seem like they ought to have a lot of impact, and yet I don’t think I see training around me.
How does good/bad UI design impact this?
I’d even go so far to say: UX bad. The whole experience of browsing the web and using applications is so much worse than ten years ago because you have thousands of functions crammed into a single application (see also: “the Unix way”) and there are help pages for how to use the assistant for using a function. This is the Inception (2010) of bad UI and UX decisions.