I spent much of Saturday night teaching an unmedicated schizophrenic how to use a new computer she’d just bought.

This was, in many ways, the high point of my day. I like teaching. Teaching is especially nice if you have every reason not to like the person you’re dealing with, or just can’t connect with them on any kind of personal level. All of that fades away into a comfortingly neutral set of canned interactions.

I also like teaching because the less your student knows, the more open you are to looking at a skill or an experience from a fresh point of view.

And this was a person who didn’t know how to click, or what a blinking text caret was, so my mind was pretty empty just a few minutes into this. It was a unique opportunity to look at the typical conventions of computer UIs — scrolling, push buttons, tabs, file trees — and ask yourself how much sense these things really make.

We had no common experience of computers at all. In fact, it’s probably safe to say our experiences of reality don’t overlap that much either. And while it can be immensely frustrating talking to a person with problems like that, it kinda gets you thinking, about the way you think about things.

* * *

Earlier in that day, we went shopping for said computer, and the first question we had was, tablet or laptop?

The computer was going to be used mostly for email, web browsing, music and movie watching. The obvious choice was a tablet.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit biased. I do not like tablets. Or more precisely, I do not like the idea of tablets. From what I’ve seen, they’re mostly geared at consuming things… and, if that’s true, I’d rather see people get a machine that at least has the potential to allow them to create interesting things.

I don’t want everyone on earth to be a computer nerd. We all have different skills, different interests. However, the cheapest laptops at the store we went to cost the same as the tablets. So I figured, why not go with the laptop? I’d like to believe that anybody could get a lot out of this, if they so desired. Even an unmedicated shizophrenic.

I don’t want to underestimate anyone. It doesn’t matter whether I like or dislike them; it doesn’t matter how functional I think they’ll ever be; I don’t want to start off by thinking of someone as beneath me.

I’m not convinced the tablet would have been easier to user for someone totally new to computers anyway, and it all comes down to one thing: affordances. Affordances are visual cues that tell you how you can interact with an object or user interface. Most tablet user interfaces I’ve seen are utterly lacking in these. If you want to scroll, you can flick along the screen, but there are no scrollbars telling you you can do this. There are no hover states on buttons because the tablet can’t detect a hover.

Don’t get me wrong, some tablet interfaces are beautiful and elegant and there’s certainly potential here. But I would hesitate to throw a technology so young at a new user.

* * *

Several days later, I’m still repeating many basic computer concepts. That’s ok. It will take a while for everything to sink in. Overall, I’m surprised by how much actually is sticking.

Being around the mentally ill is s funny thing. You could just think to yourself, gosh, I’m glad I’m sane.

But I prefer to look at it this way: if I weren’t sane, I wouldn’t know. We could all have an over-developed sense of how rational we are, and we wouldn’t know.

I’m just lucky that I can make the choice to try to improve how rational a being I am.