Windows 8 Walk Through From a 3-Year Old

With the upcoming release of Windows 8, there’s been a lot of talk about how the user interface is receiving a massive overhaul. Many tech pundits have already given up on the new design, declaring it too hard to learn and very counter-intuitive. As a response to this, Adam Desrosiers decided to post a video of his three-year old son, Julian, teaching us how to use the new operating system.

If nothing else, the video is very cute. Three-year olds have a tendency to do that. But make no mistake: this kid is able to navigate through Windows 8 quite well. With little to no instruction from his father, he is able to launch applications, pin them to the sidebar, pull forward applications from the background, and close them when he is finished. For a power user, this may not be impressive, but this is a toddler!

Some of the original reactions to the video declared that the young boy is at an advantage; he doesn’t have the ingrained know-how of older versions of Windows clouding his perception of how a computer should work. And that’s probably true. But the father says:

“For the record, I do whatever I can to keep my boy *off* the computer. We watch some sesame st videos at night and play a game or two during the day. And over the past month that we’ve had Windows 8 on this computer [and] this is how well he uses it. I could easily teach him some of the even more in depth operations of the system if I didn’t think it more important that he interact with the real world.”

And he’s right. Of course there’s going to be a learning curve with such a drastic change, but are you going to let yourself be outsmarted by a three-year old? Time will tell if the new Windows 8 interface is actually better than previous versions of the operating system. But the argument that it will be too hard to learn seems to be very weak.