3 ms·

Pfft, good luck. My 65 year old mother nearly died from stress overload when Office 2007 was released. Good fucking luck getting her to transfer to Google. It's

by jbob2000 11y ago

Pfft, good luck. My 65 year old mother nearly died from stress overload when Office 2007 was released. Good fucking luck getting her to transfer to Google. It's not free to transfer to Google when you need to retrain your entire workforce on it. Microsoft has it good with Office; they have an entire generation of Luddites dependent on them.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
The biggest problem with SaaS for seniors is that they expect the buttons to not move. Anything with continuous deployment like Google anything, basically sucks for seniors. I get a call from an old lady every time the AOL website moves a button, for serious.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  It's not even about things moving. Some are completely unable to reason about interfaces. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Her: "There's an error on my screen, what do I do?" Me: "What does the error say?" Her: "The file name you entered is too long. What do I do?" Me: "Make the file name shorter" Her: "It worked!" facepalm
- irremediable 11y ago
  I feel like this is as often the fault of the designers as the user, though. Of course it's going to confuse people if you change the design; and often, such changes are arbitrary and unnecessary.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The key point is that if you own software on your PC, it doesn't change at all. It only changes when the user allows an update to occur. Web software changes spontaneously and breaks your workflow on a regular basis. Seniors' understanding of how computers work is rarely flexible enough to adapt to this.
richmarr 11y ago
Yeah, same. My Nan looked at me in horror when I suggested giving up Sharepoint; she said it reminded her of Terence (her old cat, RIP)... and she thought I was joking when I suggested trying Slack. "But that's just Yammer" she told me when I described it. "Microsoft have got all the things I need, I don't need to use Dougal like you kids, besides, I like that Satya Nadella, he's such a nice boy" My respect goes to the guy who manages to sell these Microsoft Enterprise Agreements to the elderly. That's some hussle.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

The biggest problem with SaaS for seniors is that they expect the buttons to not move. Anything with continuous deployment like Google anything, basically sucks for seniors. I get a call from an old lady every time the AOL website moves a button, for serious.

jbob2000 11y ago
It's not even about things moving. Some are completely unable to reason about interfaces. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Her: "There's an error on my screen, what do I do?" Me: "What does the error say?" Her: "The file name you entered is too long. What do I do?" Me: "Make the file name shorter" Her: "It worked!" facepalm
irremediable 11y ago
I feel like this is as often the fault of the designers as the user, though. Of course it's going to confuse people if you change the design; and often, such changes are arbitrary and unnecessary.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  The key point is that if you own software on your PC, it doesn't change at all. It only changes when the user allows an update to occur. Web software changes spontaneously and breaks your workflow on a regular basis. Seniors' understanding of how computers work is rarely flexible enough to adapt to this.

richmarr 11y ago

Yeah, same. My Nan looked at me in horror when I suggested giving up Sharepoint; she said it reminded her of Terence (her old cat, RIP)... and she thought I was joking when I suggested trying Slack. "But that's just Yammer" she told me when I described it. "Microsoft have got all the things I need, I don't need to use Dougal like you kids, besides, I like that Satya Nadella, he's such a nice boy" My respect goes to the guy who manages to sell these Microsoft Enterprise Agreements to the elderly. That's some hussle.