Stop using digital natives as an excuse for your crappy experience.
Digital natives (Millennials and Gen Z born into the digital age) have profoundly impacted almost everything from education to the workplace and even plastic straws. The one thing they haven't changed is the need for intuitive experiences.
Unfortunately, I continue to encounter digital natives being used as a crutch for poor customer and user experience. The flawed logic is that because they're tech-savvy, they'll tolerate clunky interfaces. That's simply not the case. Designing for digital natives actually demands more investment in intuitive experiences, not less.
Digital natives may be more comfortable in a digital environment, but that doesn't make them power users. The power users are digital immigrants who grew up in the transition from analog to digital and view working with technology as a problem-solving activity. A childhood of programming VCRs, using dial-up modems, and navigating the Wild West of the Internet before Google trained these digital immigrants to function in a world where nothing worked the first, second, or third time perfectly.
Digital natives have never known a life without Alexa and iPhones. They might be more comfortable operating in a digital environment, but they also don't know a world where things don't work like magic. They're digital snobs.
Do you want to know the best way to stop my son from playing Fortnite? Unplug the XBOX. I don't even have to hide the cables. My son and his friends couldn't tell the difference between an HDMI, lightning, and USB C cable if there was a $100 Xbox gift card on the line. They also wouldn't be capable of redeeming that $100 by themselves.
If you are relying on digital natives to work through your clunky experience, it's kind of like saying that someone who grew up driving the most advanced vehicles in history, with things like dynamic radar cruise control and AI-assisted parking, will undoubtedly be able to figure out how to drive a manual.
The exception that proves the rule
Snapchat frequently gets used as evidence that digital natives are willing to put up with experiences that are confusing to older users. The iconography was baffling. The labels were vague and hid critical functionality in unintuitive locations based on traditional conventions. Snapchat has always claimed that this was by design. It was an intentional strategy to create a secret code that young users could learn but baffled their parents, not a mistake or compromise.
It's also not where the Snapchat story ends.
The more traditionally intuitive app, Instagram, copied some key functionality from Snapchat, and Snap's meteoric rise slowed. Eventually, Snapchat had to admit that their experience was broken, and they needed to make it more traditionally usable to continue to attract new users. But the niche audience that Snapchat had attracted was not happy with the attempts to make things less confusing. The mainstream users flocked to other image/video sharing apps like Instagram and TikTok, and niche users who preferred their secret-code experience got angry when the secret code got updated. I’m not saying Snapchat is dead, but its continued success is not because of a complex or unintuitive experience.
And it's not just anecdotal. Studies have shown a pretty clear trend – younger users may be more comfortable in a digital environment, but that doesn't mean they're more likely to complete tasks online.
Young people tend to be overconfident in general, but it's particularly pronounced when encountering a new digital experience. This overconfidence leads to more mistakes compared to older generations. This higher propensity for making mistakes combined with understandably high expectations and a profound lack of patience means younger users tend to give up much faster than their older counterparts.
Younger users are also much more likely to blame the system than themselves for these errors.
My parents assume that they broke the internet when things go wrong. Their grandkids know who to blame when things don't go the way they expected... you and your experience.
When creating the future, sometimes you have to power ahead and create experiences that aren't perfect. There are also niche audiences within every generation who will find a way through your obstacle course. But, if you want to move beyond niche audiences, you have to have a strategy for addressing those imperfections. You can't just rely on a mythical army of young super-users who have the ability, let alone desire, to work through the friction points in your experience.