How to Be a Tech Helper with Jack Woodard

Are you the tech helper in your family? In your office? 

Community IT intern Jack Woodard on lessons learned over years of helping less-tech-savvy people learn the technology they need to do what they need and want to do.

Takeaways on How to Be a Tech Helper

Be patient

• People who are having trouble with tech get very frustrated, and they also get very down on themselves for not being able to understand it. They aren’t setting out to be annoying or hard to deal with, but they can get very defensive or just have a lot of trouble following what you are asking them to do, especially if they have difficulty seeing or hearing. 
• People having trouble with tech have a lot of anxiety around doing the wrong thing – especially with all the scams out there. But they also want to be participating – they don’t want to miss out. So taking all that into account when you interact with any staff member or family member is good practice to help meet them where they are. 

Be a teacher, not a doer

• If the less-tech-savvy person in your life is struggling to use tech, doing it for them will reinforce that they are not capable. Instead, do a lot of listening. Identify the real problem (it may not be what they think is the issue.) Then walk the person through how to do it by asking them to do it while you stand by ready to help. 
• Describe what they need to click on. Don’t use a lot of jargon. 
• Have the person take notes, especially if they don’t use this particular app or do this particular thing every day. The next time they need to do it, they can refer back to their written instructions.
• If they are upset by updates that change things, consider teaching them to use keyboard shortcuts where available, because these change less frequently.
• Help them get organized and put the apps and tools they use most frequently where they can find them quickly at a glance. Organizing is deeply personal – so don’t impose your way of doing things on them. As a tech helper, follow their lead! 
• Walk through each step with them. Most people will continue to do something “the way they learned how” indefinitely. Use that to your advantage if you want them to do it a new way. Make sure they have learned the steps and they will probably be able to repeat them time after time. 
• Don’t forget accessibility features. Many people who struggle with tech may be hard of hearing or have difficulty seeing. Modern tech has lots of features to help, like strong contrast, screen readers, and hearing aids that can be connected to other devices directly.
• Microsoft Accessibility Knowledgebase
• Google Workspace Accessibility for Users (can also find the Accessibility Guide for Administrators)
• Mac Guide to Accessibility 

Community IT seeks to provide trusted advice and guidelines for nonprofit tech helpers around the holidays and throughout the year. If you have questions on staying safe with technology, especially in the age of AI, it is better to ask someone than struggle alone.

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• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn

Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome, everyone, to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today we have another seasonal episode, a holiday episode, around talking with people in your life who may not be as tech savvy as you are, or maybe more tech savvy than you are. 

I’m here with a special guest, Jack. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Jack Woodard: I’m Jack Woodard. I am an intern at Community IT, and I am a communication major at the University of Mary Washington.

Carolyn Woodard: I called you on to our podcast because I know you have a lot of experience in interacting with people who you have to explain some technology to. I mean, you are a Gen Z, you are a tech-fluent person, and you are also very, very helpful with your talents and like opportunities to help others with technology. 

And one of the things that you have done in this realm is you created a program at the local public library called Tech Time. So, would you like to talk a little bit about how did you get the idea for that, and how did you create that project, and what did you do?

Jack Woodard: Yeah, so that was a project I really enjoyed. I kind of saw a need in the community that I lived in, that there were a lot of people who could really probably use some of that extra help or someone to just walk them through things, because either they didn’t have immediate relatives that could help them, or they didn’t live nearby enough to be able to provide that help that they needed. So, I saw an opportunity there. 

I worked with my local library and 4-H to set it up. Which was a challenging but rewarding process. And then, I got right to it, helping. It was mostly targeted towards seniors, but it was really anyone who wanted help with a tech problem could just sign up online or drop in. And I had a table, and I would walk them through whatever problem they were having and try and solve it for them.

Carolyn Woodard: So, can you share a couple of anecdotes without naming names of the types of problems that people brought to you and how you helped them?

Jack Woodard: Yeah. So, there’s kind of a couple wide buckets of sort of problems that you’d run into. 

One of them was, “I don’t know anything about technology at all.” I just got a smartphone, or I’ve had a smartphone for some time and not used it, and I need somebody to show me how it works because I need to call my grandkids, or my son, or my daughter, or whoever. I need to be able to use this phone. That was one large group of people. 

And in some ways, they were kind of the easiest to work with, because they had no base foundation knowledge of how a smartphone works whatsoever, which meant you’re kind of starting from scratch, which can be difficult. But it also means that you have sort of the opportunity to set them along the right path and get them going, give them a good foundation to work off of, which can be really nice. 

Then the second large bucket was kind of, “I know how to use technology, kind of, but I’m having a more specific issue,” maybe with a specific app or program, something like that, a website. I can’t get into something, I forgot the password and I need to reset it and I don’t know how to do that. Something along those lines, right? 

One of the most common complaints that I would group in this was, I can’t get into my Facebook and I really need to get into my Facebook. So, people that have some experience with technology but aren’t super confident and need a little bit of coaching, usually with one specific area that they’re having trouble with. And this group was pretty easy to work with as well. There could be some problems sometimes where they were doing something in like a weird or less ideal way of doing it. Where you had to be like, you know, here’s a better way of doing that. And sometimes they’re kind of resistant to that. 

And then the last big group was, “I am confident with technology. I am having this one really weird specific issue that I need someone else to talk about it with.” Oftentimes, this will happen with more complex work applications like Word, PowerPoint, a lot of stuff within the Office Suite. I had someone come in that needed help with a vector mapping application. And I was a little bit above my mathematical abilities to be able to help you with the actual content, but I can certainly show you around the app. 

And this group, in many ways, is actually the hardest to work with because they are confident and kind of set in their ways. And so it can be hard because a lot of the times when they struggle with their chosen application, it’s because the app has updated and something is different and they have a hard time navigating that change because they built up that confidence, they built up a way of doing it, and now it doesn’t work anymore. And that can be really upsetting and challenging for them. And that was probably the least common bucket I handled. But it was rewarding nonetheless to get to help those people so that they could, usually it was keep doing their job, whatever it was. 

And I should note, a lot of, if we’re going to put a Venn diagram with people who struggle with tech savviness and people that have eyesight or hearing issues, there’s a lot of overlap there. So a big thing I’ve encountered when trying to help those people is to present whatever you’re trying to teach in a way that they can understand and interact with it, instead of just going through super-fast, talking fast, maybe not loud enough, and just assuming people know what you are talking about. 

One thing I had happen that kind of changed my whole worldview in a way was I told someone to hit the save icon and they said, “what’s the save icon?” They didn’t know what it was. And that kind of changed the way that I was approaching things to assume less about people and assume they kind of, unless they said otherwise, wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

Carolyn Woodard: And I know for that program, you were very clear on the sign-up sheet and all of the marketing information about it that there were some things that you couldn’t do. And I think you said you ran into someone who had a much, much older iPad, was it, or a laptop that really you couldn’t help them with. They needed to do all the security updates, and it wouldn’t even take updates anymore.

Jack Woodard: Yeah, I encountered someone who was using, I believe it was Windows 7 in year 2024, which, Windows 7, good operating system. However, very old, I think that came out in 2007, actually 2009. It’s as old as I am. And is no longer receiving updates from Microsoft or really anyone else. 

And the problems they were having is that they couldn’t update their applications and they couldn’t access things. And ultimately the answer was, I can’t really help you. It’s not a problem with the way you’re using it or the problem with what’s installed. It’s just an age problem with your device, which is never a satisfying answer to give people. You really want to be able to help them. But sometimes whatever their problem is, is an issue that’s larger than the both of you. And often requires some other external factor to solve it.

Carolyn Woodard: So that leads me into my next question, was that I said this is a holiday episode and we’re moving into the holidays, the year end. A lot of people are going to be together. Maybe they’re going to get new devices. Maybe the grandparents are going to get new devices. Are they going to be together with a more tech savvy family member who could, you know, they have some question they’ve been wanting to ask them, like why can’t I see this or why can’t I do this or can you help me with my phone or my iPad? 

Do you have advice for people if you are like you, the younger person or more tech savvy person who is helping someone like that in your family? What would you tell them to do?

Jack Woodard: I’d say be patient. That’s the biggest thing. It can take a little while sometimes. And a lot of the time, you’re going to be tempted to just do it yourself. But that’s not a good solution, I found. It’s sort of more of a teaching than a doing experience, right? 

I think if you treat it like that, both of you will get a lot more out of it. It’ll be a lot less frustrating for you. And it’ll be a lot less frustrating for them. And ultimately, they will get whatever, they will be able to do whatever they need to do themselves, which is usually better than having to call you every time they need to do it. 

And I think along with that, treat it like you’re teaching a class. Encourage them to take notes, walk through the process step by step, is a big thing. I think I mentioned the save icon, try and describe things in a way that they will be able to understand. 

Don’t use the slang jargon. You might have heard of calling the three lines up in the corner that usually represents a menu the hamburger. You don’t have to even know what the hamburger is. You got to sort of approach it in a way that they can understand, give instructions in a way that they’re able to follow. So for instance, instead of saying go to the hamburger, say go to the three lines in the upper right corner or the three dots or whatever it is. Because that can make it a lot easier. 

And then also when they’re taking notes and they know they’re going to need to find something again, but maybe not right away, they’re not practicing it a ton, they can write down. Go to the three lines in the upper right corner and they’ll know what that is and they’ll know where that is. 

That’s another big thing, taking notes, whether you need to take them for them, write out a little instruction document of here’s how you get to where you need to go, or whether they want to do it themselves. I’ve found that can be really helpful, both in my experience dealing with my own relatives and my experience dealing with people through tech time. 

I find notes were probably the most helpful thing to sort of bridge that gap, because a lot of the times, the thing that people have trouble with is not the application that they interact with every day. It’s the thing that they only have to use once a month or once every couple months. And because they don’t have that practice, they’re not doing it all the time, they forget how to get where they need to go, how to sign in, how to do whatever. They don’t remember how to do that, because it’s been so long. And so notes can really help bridge that gap for them to help them either jog their memory or just be an outright instruction of how to get to where they need to go, how to do what they need to do.

Carolyn Woodard: One thing that I have noticed that when you interact with people is you’ll often ask them, can you see that? Can you see the icon I’m talking about or the three little buttons? And one thing when people have difficulty seeing is to set their contrast pretty high. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jack Woodard: So I’ve got a good amount of experience dealing with people that have some form of disability that might interact with how they interact with tech. My grandmother has severely reduced vision, and I had several people that I worked with through tech time that were either partially deaf or partially blind. It made it hard for them to use their technology because they couldn’t see things, they couldn’t hear things, they couldn’t interact with those features that technology is based around. 

And it’s actually worth noting when we’re talking about this that the segment of people that have trouble seeing and the segment of people that have trouble hearing is there’s actually a lot of overlap. Often people will be dealing with both of those challenges at the same time, which can further complicate things. 

One of the big things that you can do to help is you can adjust the size of text and the contrast of whatever device they’re using, which can be very, very helpful. Usually, it will be found in settings under Accessibility. There will be a setting to adjust the text size and screen brightness. And those can be some of the best ways to help, because obviously it’s easier to see things when they’re bigger. 

And there’s a lot of, most devices offer a lot of flexibility with just how much you can adjust that. So you can make the text absolutely huge if that’s what you need. You can make it medium. You can just really do whatever you want. I know some devices now are also featuring an outline feature for text. So you can have the text be one color and then have an outline of like a different bright color, which can help it be even easier to see it, because it provides even more contrast. 

The contrast itself can be turned up. A lot of the time, people will have, inadvertently, because a lot of devices auto-dim your screen to protect the battery. You can, one, turn that off. And, two, set their brightness all the way up, so that the screen is brighter and that it’s easier for them to see it. 

And those are some of the big tips that I’ve found to be helpful. Additionally, for people who have hearing challenges and are also perhaps using something like a screen reader to make it easier for them to interact with tech, a lot of hearing aids, especially modern ones, offer the ability to hook them up directly to your phone, so that those accessibility features will function in conjunction with the hearing aids, which can be very helpful for some people.

Carolyn Woodard: So, you were talking about you as the person who’s more tech savvy giving assistance. And I know that sometimes people who are having trouble with tech get very frustrated. They might lash out a little bit. They feel stupid. They feel like they ought to be able to understand it, and so they can really like lose a lot of confidence in themselves. And in addition to being so frustrated. 

So, what are some ways that you would give people advice to interact with you when they’re having a tech problem?

Jack Woodard: I think a big thing is that hopefully the person that you’re working with will be understanding. And I think the biggest thing is that it’s okay to be frustrated. A lot of things, a lot of applications, everyone is trying to force you into a digital space. And you may not be comfortable with that, and that’s okay. 

More and more, everything is online. Your banking, your email, your phone calls, everything has to be through the internet. And that can be really bewildering and hard. Especially if you’ve gotten used to doing it in a different way. 

I had a person that came to Tech Time that they exclusively wrote letters and used their landline phone, and they had never used a smartphone before, but their son-in-law had gotten them one so that they could stay in touch and be able to call their grandkids and do all of that stuff. And it was really frustrating for her to have to sort of relearn these skills that she thought she already had down. You know, she had them in the bag, and now she had to relearn everything, which is really hard and really frustrating.

And hopefully, the person that you’re working with will understand that, and if they don’t, kind of try and communicate that to them. Be like, I’m sorry I’m getting frustrated with this. You know, it’s just, it’s really hard to have to relearn these skills that I felt confident in before, but now I’ve had to move to a different medium that I don’t feel quite so comfortable in.

Carolyn Woodard: I think a lot of people who have lower tech savviness also are very worried they’re going to do the wrong thing. They’re going to click on something wrong, they have absorbed the idea that everyone’s out to get them. There are lots of scams out there. There’s lots of people trying to take advantage of you. 

And especially if you can’t see very well or you don’t totally know how to use an app, you could be very afraid that you’re going to do the wrong thing. But then you also want to participate. You don’t want to miss out on calling or texting with your kids or your colleagues or your friends. So that’s something good to take into account too. 

I wanted to kind of move a little bit from the personal realms. So, if you’re home for the holidays and interacting with someone in your family around technology and learning something new or setting something up, and I wanted you to maybe think about someone on the staff of a nonprofit who is an IT director or more tech savvy than others. Maybe they’re the accidental techie or maybe there’s always someone in an office that everyone turns to, they’re like, oh, you know how this works or you’ve started using AI. Can you teach me something? 

You know, you use Excel all the time and I have to do this thing and I don’t totally know how to do it. If you are that person, the IT director or the accidental techie, and you want to help improve the tech-savvy-ness of your staff around critical systems like cybersecurity do and don’ts or how to use file sharing effectively if they’re using Google Drive or if they’re using Microsoft SharePoint, you know, and there’s all those ins and outs of like how we save things and how we share them and work on them together.

Do you have some advice on how to meet those people where they are, if it’s a staff member, not a family member?

Jack Woodard: I think the biggest thing for mastering any skill, and this goes for tech as well, is kind of the practice makes perfect adage. I think you need to, you obviously need to train them, but I think make the training fun is a big thing and make it something that’s regular. Because if you just show someone how to do something one time, and just have them prove that they can do it one time, they’re probably going to forget if they don’t do it again right away. 

I think the biggest thing is just have a practice makes perfect attitude, and have regular check-ins with them. Be like, hey, how’s it going? Is everything with this working all right? Is there anything I can help you with? You need me to show you how to do it again? 

You know, just have that attitude of, it might take them a while to get it, but they will if they keep practicing it. And I think that’s kind of the attitude to have is, you’re not going to get it right the first time, but if you keep coming back and meeting them where they’re at with whatever they need help with, because sometimes it won’t be, I don’t need help with the whole thing, I’m just stuck on this one step. Or maybe they do need help with the whole thing, and they’re not just stuck on one step. So have open communication with them and have that attitude of, there’s no rush to get it done right now, let’s work through this and get you to a place where you’re comfortable.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I like that some people say there’s no dumb questions, just make sure you’re a person that people can ask what they might think of as a dumb question, because often you’ll uncover a whole, like you thought they were doing it one way and they’re doing it this other way. And I think especially Microsoft gives you so many different paths to accomplish the same thing in Excel or Word or PowerPoint, that it’s like you said, people build up a way that they do it, a path that they know from when they log in to when they do the thing, and they always do it that way. And then there’s an update and something changes, and you need to figure out, learn the new way to do it. 

But I think it’s true that once you have those pathways, if you can teach someone quote unquote the new way that they’re doing it, often, I think 90% of the time, people will do it that way from then on. They know, oh, this is the way I’m supposed to do it. So you can use that to your advantage too.

Jack Woodard: Yeah, I’m actually going to touch on the idea of like things updating and there being a new way. 

Something I don’t see a lot of people talking about is keyboard shortcuts as a way to do things instead of navigating through complicated menus. I love keyboard shortcuts personally. But I think they can also be a really great way to help people bridge that gap of knowledge because oftentimes, instead of having to navigate three different menus and knowing where to click and now there’s a drop down and it used to be just a click out and whatever, a lot of the times there will be a keyboard shortcut for that function that stays the same and doesn’t change. 

And it’s also very easy to write those buttons down on a note that they can stick to their monitor or wherever they need it, so that if they need to know how to do that thing, they know how to do it. 

For instance, find in page, instead of having to click through three different buttons in your browser, it’s Ctrl-F or Command-F if you’re on Apple. And that hasn’t changed and it’s probably not going to. So that can be a really great way of helping people to find a way that they can do it and then that way stays the same for them because they’re always updating applications, but generally keyboard shortcuts are pretty static. So I find they can be a helpful way to give people a method that they can just keep following and won’t have to mess with.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, and I think even in the bigger picture, that touches on something that I know that you do and have helped me do, which is if it’s an app that you use all the time, that goes on maybe your homepage. The way you arrange things of something that you’re going to need a lot, maybe you put it in a folder that that’s the folder that almost everything you use all the time is in. And there’s an organization and it’s easy to find the things that you need to use there.

Jack Woodard: Yeah, definitely. I think organization is a big thing because it can be really helpful or it can be really harmful. 

I think teaching someone else how to organize but not doing it for them is a big thing because everyone will have a different way that they will find things, you know, obvious, right? I have everything on my desktop in one folder which then branches out into three folders which then each have their own folders. And I find that is a reasonable way of finding things. For some people, that’s not true. That won’t work for them. 

So, show people the options that they have to organize because I definitely agree it can be super helpful, especially on like mobile devices like the home page on your phone or the, I forget what it’s called, the bottom bar where you can put like three or four apps. That can be super duper helpful for people to just always have it there. And they don’t have to swipe through, you know, multiple pages of apps trying to find what they want. They don’t have to look through a bunch of folders. It’s just right there. 

I know there’s one thing that was super helpful with my grandmother was when we set up her new iPad, we set it up so that she had a couple of essential apps on that home bar at the bottom, so that she could always find them. Because she was having trouble, she had a lot of apps, she had to swipe through and find each of them. And it was hard for her, especially because she couldn’t see very well, which made it difficult to differentiate between the different app icons. But just having them there in a static place that stays the same and is easily accessible was really big. 

And that was something similar I encountered across my time doing tech time, was that setting people up with a way where they could easily find everything was really, really impactful and beneficial. 

But that’s something that they kind of have to decide for themselves also, how they want to set that up. But a lot of the time, it’s kind of a show them how to do it and then be there if they need help while they’re doing it situation.

Carolyn Woodard: Follow their lead on the method that’s going to make sense to them.

Jack Woodard: Because organization is deeply, deeply personal. Everyone will have a different way that they want to do it. Yeah.

Carolyn Woodard: Well, Jack, I want to thank you for your time today. I hope the people in the audience are finding some of these tips and advice helpful, both when you are interacting with your family over the holidays and new technology, the tech savvy and the less tech savvy among us. I hope you can meet each other where you are. 

And as you said, Jack, people want to participate. They want to be able to use their devices. They have to, you know, in a lot of cases, you have to use them because you have to interact with your bank or your email, Facebook. And so, you need to have those updates and having somebody in your life at your office or in your family who’s willing to have that patience, and see it as a teaching time together, that you can do something together, I think is really something to be mindful of and think about when you go into the holidays. 

So, thank you so much for helping us work together to use technology better.

Jack Woodard: Yep, no problem. Thank you for having me.