Millennials as Digital Natives: Myths and Realities

“Millennial” is currently one of the most popular buzzwords in the media. As of 2015, Millennials became the largest generation in the American workforce (35%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

There are many characteristics that make Millennials interesting to study — their racial diversity, their status as the most educated generation to date, their low marriage and fertility rates, just to name a few. But what is perhaps most relevant to UX professionals is this generation’s childhood experiences with technology, and how they shape its behaviors today.

Before discussing Millennials’ digital upbringing, however, we have to establish one essential definition.

Who Counts as a Millennial?

The answer to this question depends on whom you ask. A Millennial is broadly defined as someone who became an adult around the year 2000. However, actually providing a specific range of birth years for this generation can be a bit complicated.

Generational research is naturally messy, but the boundaries for the Millennial generation tend to be particularly muddled. Older generations such as the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, and the Baby Boomers are defined by significant events — World War II, the Great Depression, the 1946 fertility spike. Generation X, the parents of the Millennials, began with the widespread availability of birth control in 1964. But there are no clear events that separate Millennials from either the previous generation, Generation X, or the following generation, Generation Z. As a result, there’s some confusion around the precise birth years for the Millennial generation, and different researchers tend to use slightly different ranges.

(As you can see from the table, there's an alphabetical gap between Generations X and Z. This is because "Generation Y" has sometimes been used as an alternate name for Millennials. However, "Millennials" is the most common usage and the one we prefer for the simple usability reason that it's a name that makes at least some amount of sense, rather than being an arbitrary letter.)

The most generally accepted range for the birth years of the Millennial generation is 1980 to 2000. For the most part, when you see researchers deviate from that definition, they’re usually using a subsegment of that range (for example, 1982 to 1997).

In our research for the course Designing for Young Adult Users, we focused on individuals born from 1986 to 1997. We chose this range because we’re particularly interested in people who were children in the mid to late 1990s, during the rapid increase in personal Internet usage. These individuals were the first to grow up alongside communications technology — the first to be referred to as ‘digital natives.’

Millennials as ‘Digital Natives’: Myths and Realities

A digital native is someone who was raised in a digital, media-saturated world. The term is often used synonymously with ‘Millennial’, though not all digital natives are Millennials — for example, the members of the newest generation, Gen Z, are also digital natives. Plus, not all Millennials are digital natives — there are many members who had limited access to communications technology while growing up (for example, those raised in poverty).

The term ‘digital native’ was coined by Marc Prensky, an education consultant, in 2001. He argued that digital-native children have vastly different learning requirements than what he called ‘digital immigrants,’ and that digital natives “think and process information fundamentally differently.”

Prensky’s claims were understandably controversial, and they sparked a continuing debate over whether being raised with digital interfaces changes human beings’ ability to function and process information. Other researchers and commentators (such as Dr. Gary Small) have suggested that digital natives’ brains are actually hardwired differently, due to exposure to the new kinds of stimuli created by digital interfaces. Those claims are sometimes criticized as feeding into moral panic and into fears that the new generations are irreparably damaged or fundamentally different.

It’s unclear and unproven whether digital natives actually do differ in their cognitive abilities from digital immigrants. What is clear, however, is that this idea feeds into three widespread misconceptions about Millennials:

• MYTH 1: “Digital natives possess inferior social skills or are more likely to avoid personal interaction in favor of digital interaction.”
• MYTH 2: “Digital natives are much better at multitasking than digital immigrants.”
• MYTH 3: “Digital natives have natural instincts about how to use or fix computers and other digital products.”

Our findings (and other research studies) suggest that all these assertions are false.

MYTH 1: “Digital natives possess inferior social skills or are more likely to avoid personal interaction in favor of digital interaction.”

A major source of the moral panic surrounding digital natives is the fear that adolescents will become socially stunted if they interact with their peers through primarily electronic formats like text messaging, instant messaging, and social media.

As the younger Millennials — those who had access to text messaging and social media as early as elementary school — begin to reach adulthood, we’re seeing signs that our concerns may have been unfounded. In a recent study on smartphone use, Pew Research Center found that American young adults did send more text messages than older adults, but their rates of voice calling were about the same as those of older adults. That finding suggests that, for this type of interaction at least, young adults supplement vocal interactions with textual ones — rather than replacing them out of some instinctive fear of interacting with a human being.

In our recent usability testing and interviews, many of our young-adult participants mentioned wanting to speak to a human being (over the phone or in person) for help, particularly when they couldn’t easily figure out something on their own. When one Millennial user couldn’t find visitor information on a hospital website, he said, “By this time I would just call. I like calling more than searching because I get better answers.” For many Millennials, person-to-person contact is still a reliable and effective solution to their problems — not something they fear or avoid.

MYTH 2: “Digital natives are much better at multitasking than digital immigrants.”

Many people believe that because digital natives were raised in an information-overloaded environment, they’re better at efficiently performing two or more activities at once. Measuring the ability to multitask for an entire generation is challenging — the ability to actually process multiple streams of information at once depends on a lot of variables, including the complexity of the information and the context.

We must distinguish between:

• choosing to multitask — that is, purposefully engaging in multiple activities at apparently the same time, and
• multitasking proficiency — that is, the ability to process multiple sources of information at the same time efficiently.

Two human–computer interaction studies at University of California, Irvine and at California State University have found some indication that Millennials are indeed more likely to multitask than older generations — for example, they switch between tasks more frequently and tend to use different media at the same time.

Like anyone else, however, Millennials pay a price for multitasking. Frequent alternation between tasks increases cognitive load and forces us to reorient ourselves to each task each time. Psychology researchers like Cliff Nass have demonstrated the negative impact of chronic multitasking on efficiency and cognitive performance. Nass and colleagues found that heavy multitaskers had more difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli, and took 0.5 seconds longer than light multitaskers to re-focus their attention when switching between two different types of tasks (suggesting that due to negative cognitive effects, heavy multitaskers are actually worse at multitasking than people who only occasionally multitask).

Additionally, as the research of Gloria Mark and colleagues showed, frequent context switching in Millennial college students is correlated with higher stress (though the causation in this relationship is unclear — it’s possible that people are more likely to try to multitask when they’re under stress).

To conclude the discussion on this second myth, while digital natives may be more likely to choose to multitask, they are not more efficient multitaskers.

MYTH 3: “Digital natives have natural instincts about how to use or fix computers and other digital products.”

A pervasive misconception about digital natives is that they have some kind of inborn knowledge or learning ability in connection with digital products. That may be true for specific subgroups of Millennials (for example, Millennials who are also software engineers), but it is false for the generation as a whole. When one Millennial user was intimidated by the tech specs on a computer website, he said, “I want to go to the store or chat online. I want someone to explain this to me better.”

In a large survey that tested respondents’ knowledge about various aspects of the internet, Pew Research Center found that young adults performed better than older adults on questions about common internet-usage conventions (for example, they are familiar with concepts such as wikis, advanced search, and hashtags.) However, the findings also indicated that young adults were no more knowledgeable than older adults about the underlying structure of the web, major tech leaders (like Bill Gates), or even important concepts like net neutrality.

We frequently see Millennial users getting stumped in usability testing when they encounter difficult user interfaces. Their interactions tend to be fast-paced. Because they spend less time on any given page, Millennials are more likely to make errors, and they read even less than the average user (which is already very little).

How Being a Digital Native Does Influence Behavior

While we did not find Millennials to be a semievolved technology-savvy super-generation (or a group of cyborg-like antisocial screen addicts), we did discover that Millennials’ early experiences with digital interfaces shaped their behaviors, at least to some extent.

Millennials in our studies were distinctive in their attitudes towards communications technology, their preferences, and their information-seeking strategies (for example, they used browser tabs for page parking, and they had a slightly above-average ability to determine clickability in flat interfaces.)

On average, Millennials seem to be highly confident in their approach to digital interfaces, even when encountering radically new design patterns. This contributes to their tendency to be error-prone.

Many Millennials were in grade school or college when Google first rose to popularity, and it was a critical influence in setting the level of simplicity and directness that Millennials have come to expect from interfaces. They don’t care if (for example) your enterprise application has significantly more complex features to consider. When interfaces fail to live up to those unrealistic standards of simplicity, Millennials rarely blame themselves — unlike older users. Millennials are quick to criticize the interface, its organization, or its designers.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve barely scratched the surface of Millennials’ fascinating behaviors and attitudes. For any curious UXer, this group is worthy of study by virtue of its uniqueness alone — but that’s not why they’re so frequently discussed in popular culture.

Millennials are rising into their adulthood now. They’re moving from an object of speculation and moral panic to a reality. They currently make up over a quarter of the American population, and about a quarter of the European Union’s. They are heavy web users, and, according to research by Youbrand, have an estimated purchasing power of $2.45 trillion worldwide. Many of them are starting families and debuting careers. These are the people that will be making purchasing decisions, forming brand loyalties, and influencing their peers.

Millennials are a big, powerful generation coming into their own, with high standards and unique characteristics. They’re well worth our attention.

References

Carrier, L., Cheever, N., Rosen, L., Benitez, S., & Chang, J. Multitasking across generations: Multitasking choices and difficulty ratings in three generations of Americans. Computers in Human Behavior 25, 483–489 (2009).

Mark, G., Wang, Y., & Niiya, M. Stress and multitasking in everyday college life. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '14 (2014).

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 15583–15587 (2009).

Pew Internet, 2014. What Internet Users Know about Technology and the Web. (2014). http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/25/web-iq/

Pew Internet. U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015 (2015). http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/

Prensky, Marc. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001). http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf