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> Touchscreens are pretty natural and intuitive Try to watch someone in their 60s operate them and you will learn that the are anything but. My dad find them

> Touchscreens are pretty natural and intuitive Try to watch someone in their 60s operate them and you will learn that the are anything but. My dad find them endlessly frustrating, as his first instinct when talking about something in an image or something is to put his finger on it. But that invariably triggers something on such a screen. He also struggles with things like Google Maps on a PC with a scroll mouse, as to him the natural action is to "pull" the map closer rather than "zoom in". End result is that he often find himself scrolling the wrong way...

madeofpalk 8y ago
I've seen the 'super hybrid' a few times, at least in Australia, on both ATMs and credit card machines. A touch screen (with physical numpad) at but with positional buttons on the side so the choices can be both touched, or use the buttons. For me it creates a bit of cognitive overhead at first - I'm getting mixed messages as to how to interact - but then I make a random guess and its right. No matter which I tried, I would have been right.
RandallBrown 8y ago
Try watching children operate touchscreen and you'll see that they are quite intuitive. The biggest difference is they don't have 60+ years of experience telling them what won't work (because it didn't used to) like your dad probably does.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Kids will try anything, just to see what happens (i think i issued the format c: command within days of the first PC arriving in our home back in the day). They are possibly the worst indicator of "intuitive" out there.
  - JTbane 8y ago
    >i think i issued the format c: command within days of the first PC arriving in our home back in the day I did the same thing!- good thing we had some OS floppies lying around
Izkata 8y ago
Or just jumping from an older interface to a modern one. I'm a 30-year-old software developer and just had this experience with Google's "Material Design" on my new Android phone, took quite a while to figure out what did what. It's been a week and I'm still discovering things by accident or having to look up online how to do things because it's all hidden away with no visual indicators. I've pretty much decided to shun the whole thing and make things look like what they are whenever I make UIs.

madeofpalk 8y ago

I've seen the 'super hybrid' a few times, at least in Australia, on both ATMs and credit card machines. A touch screen (with physical numpad) at but with positional buttons on the side so the choices can be both touched, or use the buttons. For me it creates a bit of cognitive overhead at first - I'm getting mixed messages as to how to interact - but then I make a random guess and its right. No matter which I tried, I would have been right.

RandallBrown 8y ago

Try watching children operate touchscreen and you'll see that they are quite intuitive. The biggest difference is they don't have 60+ years of experience telling them what won't work (because it didn't used to) like your dad probably does.

digi_owl 8y ago
Kids will try anything, just to see what happens (i think i issued the format c: command within days of the first PC arriving in our home back in the day). They are possibly the worst indicator of "intuitive" out there.
- JTbane 8y ago
  >i think i issued the format c: command within days of the first PC arriving in our home back in the day I did the same thing!- good thing we had some OS floppies lying around

Izkata 8y ago

Or just jumping from an older interface to a modern one. I'm a 30-year-old software developer and just had this experience with Google's "Material Design" on my new Android phone, took quite a while to figure out what did what. It's been a week and I'm still discovering things by accident or having to look up online how to do things because it's all hidden away with no visual indicators. I've pretty much decided to shun the whole thing and make things look like what they are whenever I make UIs.