I sometimes go to "kaiten sushi" (sushi comes around on a conveyor belt and you can pick what you like) with my mother in law. There is an order system where y

I sometimes go to "kaiten sushi" (sushi comes around on a conveyor belt and you can pick what you like) with my mother in law. There is an order system where you can use a touch panel to order something specific if you want it. Granted my mother in law is 86 and hasn't really used computers before, but it always amazes me that she can't figure out "buttons" on the screen. For her, they are just text with coloured backgrounds She tries reading the text, but it just doesn't make sense to her because it is essentially splatted randomly around the screen. Eventually she realised that text with a red background is a button and so now she thinks that all buttons are red! She has not been able to jump to the idea that these rectangular areas of the screen with the same background colour are buttons. I've tried explaining in the past, but she's completely uninterested and so never listens to me. In the end, watching her struggle is so interesting that I've stopped trying to help her. We take a lot of things for granted when we think about UX.