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This is excellent. My grandma (89) uses an iPad and iPhone. She can use both these devices exactly because of the simplicity mentioned in the article. 1. Open

This is excellent. My grandma (89) uses an iPad and iPhone. She can use both these devices exactly because of the simplicity mentioned in the article. 1. Open app by tapping it. 2. Close it by tapping the physical button. (rip) That's it. And that's why my grandma can use it. The first and only device she comfortably uses to this day. People in our (tech) communities tend to overestimate a users ability with technology.

bathtub365 7y ago
The article is partially about how bad the UX is on iPad.
tsmarsh 7y ago
I work with people with multiple phds. They’re smart. Technology focused professionals and they still have problems. Computer skill must be a parretto distribution. The difference between the top 1% and top 0.5%is enormous.
irrational 7y ago
Same here. My grandmother is 97. She grew up as a shepherdess during the great depression, was a nurse during WWII, and then raised 6 children. She has no technical training, but she can use an iPad with no trouble while she always struggled using a desktop computer or laptop. iPads really are great for her use case.
- mort96 7y ago
  My experience is similar, but my grandmother has gotten worse at using her iPad as iOS has gotten more and more confusing. I usually see her with Safari in split-screen as Gruber mentioned, and know that: A) there's not really any way to teach her to get out of it because the gestures literally require more precise movements than her fingers are capable of, and B) there's no way to teach her to avoid open Safari in split-screen mode, because I constantly do it myself accidentally too on my iPad. The iPad used to be a really great device for her use case, but the more they add gestures which it's easy to accidentally trigger but hard (as in physically hard, requiring precise finger movements) to reverse, the worse it gets.
  - jdminhbg 7y ago
    Just in case you haven't seen any of the updates elsewhere, there is an Accessibility setting to turn off multi-tasking/split-screen that would most likely help your grandmother: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207582 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207582
qmmmur 7y ago
Let me recount an experience I heard second hand of a researcher developing user interfaces for research tools. Keep in mind the target audiences are people with PhD's and who have to comb through lots of data in order to do their job. They struggled with _double click_ as a concept. How fast, not moving the mouse in-between clicks etc, etc. Some people are really virginial when it comes to anything other than doing things the slowest way possible on a computer.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  I know people who have been web developers for a decade, that double click hyperlinks. If something works when you do it... you just get a habit of it.
- nickpeterson 7y ago
  That's a great point. I think technical users underestimate how much of what they 'understand' is really intuition from years of struggling through computers.
- ksec 7y ago
  I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not. I remember twenty years ago teaching my parents double click, they then spend years on computer and they still cant understand it. They have 4 modes in their mental model, Left Click, Right Click, and Double Click on both Left and Right. They dont understand when to use which. A lot of nerds / geeks/ tech people to this day still dont understand what makes the whole touch screen / iPhone UX so special. Scott Forstall said it [2] these people just dont get it. The single tap app opening may have been trivial for most of us, it was a world of difference to 95% of consumers. ( And that is why you should not put these people into consumer tech product design ) [1] Something Steve Jobs said with regards to people dont know how to use a keyboard, but I cant find the video with Google. It was during an interview with Walt Mossberg. [2]https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=3102 https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=3102
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not. Wasn't this one of the reasons why Solitaire was included with Windows 3: to teach people about using a mouse?
slantyyz 7y ago
I'm kinda jealous of your experience. My dad (early 80s) struggles with tech in general, including the iPad and iPhone. Many in his peer group use touchscreen devices with fewer issues. This is what I noticed from trying to teach him how to use the interfaces: 1 - He refuses to mentally process what the icons represent and ignores the text label below them. I thought switching them to Chinese would help, but he'd struggle with some of the terms, as they were unfamiliar to him. For a person his age and background, "address book" is more meaningful than "contacts". 2 - He wants to memorize locations and steps as opposed to using intuition via #1. This sometimes helped, but there would be occasional pitfalls, i.e., an unintentional gesture pulls him out of what he's doing and then he just doesn't doesn't know how to get back. I tried switching him to an old school feature phone (one of the newer Nokia remakes), but even that's a struggle, as there's simply too much UI, and I notice rocker buttons confuse the hell out of him. Many of these devices are marketed to seniors (and pretty much have the same interface and functions) but I don't think they were really tested with seniors. My dad doesn't have or use the Internet, and he's starting to get left behind as large companies are trying to move away from snail mail for things like bills, etc.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  The "Address Book" vs. "Contacts" one is a good example. The one that hits some of the non-techies I know is "Drive". More than a handful of people I know still confuse it with Maps. They are going to drive to the next town over, and want directions, so obviously they look for Google Drive. I'd guess 99% of the population associates the word "Drive" with cars and driving, and 1% associates it with "internal storage" yet what did we geeks decide?
  - slantyyz 7y ago
    While I get that designers hate skeuomorphism, I tend to think there are still significant benefits to it with seniors. With my dad in particular, if the icons were literally photos (as opposed to "graphically designed" icons) of real world objects he was familiar with, I think it would help... a little. He doesn't seem to process abstractions very well. For example, a shadowed head in a contacts icon has absolutely zero meaning for him. Even with non-touchscreen UI's, such as a media player, my dad doesn't quite grasp the concept of a highlighted item no matter how many times I try to explain it to him. It gets even more confusing for him if the highlight changes color in different parts of the UI. It would be nice if voice ui's were more advanced, but he speaks a dialect of Chinese that's much less common than Mandarin or Cantonese, so there's another issue.
ajmurmann 7y ago
I've found the very small bezel on newer iPads to be a problem for my parents in their 60s. Since I got them a new iPad they frequently will accidentally exit FaceTime while talking to them and then not know how to get back. The unintuitive multi-tasking is actually an advantage for them. It's hard to accidentally end up in that mode and they wouldn't have a need to ever use it. If it was easier to get into multi-tasking, they likely would only want to know how to stop it.

bathtub365 7y ago

The article is partially about how bad the UX is on iPad.

tsmarsh 7y ago

I work with people with multiple phds. They’re smart. Technology focused professionals and they still have problems. Computer skill must be a parretto distribution. The difference between the top 1% and top 0.5%is enormous.

irrational 7y ago

Same here. My grandmother is 97. She grew up as a shepherdess during the great depression, was a nurse during WWII, and then raised 6 children. She has no technical training, but she can use an iPad with no trouble while she always struggled using a desktop computer or laptop. iPads really are great for her use case.

mort96 7y ago
My experience is similar, but my grandmother has gotten worse at using her iPad as iOS has gotten more and more confusing. I usually see her with Safari in split-screen as Gruber mentioned, and know that: A) there's not really any way to teach her to get out of it because the gestures literally require more precise movements than her fingers are capable of, and B) there's no way to teach her to avoid open Safari in split-screen mode, because I constantly do it myself accidentally too on my iPad. The iPad used to be a really great device for her use case, but the more they add gestures which it's easy to accidentally trigger but hard (as in physically hard, requiring precise finger movements) to reverse, the worse it gets.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  Just in case you haven't seen any of the updates elsewhere, there is an Accessibility setting to turn off multi-tasking/split-screen that would most likely help your grandmother: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207582 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207582

qmmmur 7y ago

Let me recount an experience I heard second hand of a researcher developing user interfaces for research tools. Keep in mind the target audiences are people with PhD's and who have to comb through lots of data in order to do their job. They struggled with _double click_ as a concept. How fast, not moving the mouse in-between clicks etc, etc. Some people are really virginial when it comes to anything other than doing things the slowest way possible on a computer.

brianwawok 7y ago
I know people who have been web developers for a decade, that double click hyperlinks. If something works when you do it... you just get a habit of it.
nickpeterson 7y ago
That's a great point. I think technical users underestimate how much of what they 'understand' is really intuition from years of struggling through computers.
ksec 7y ago
I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not. I remember twenty years ago teaching my parents double click, they then spend years on computer and they still cant understand it. They have 4 modes in their mental model, Left Click, Right Click, and Double Click on both Left and Right. They dont understand when to use which. A lot of nerds / geeks/ tech people to this day still dont understand what makes the whole touch screen / iPhone UX so special. Scott Forstall said it [2] these people just dont get it. The single tap app opening may have been trivial for most of us, it was a world of difference to 95% of consumers. ( And that is why you should not put these people into consumer tech product design ) [1] Something Steve Jobs said with regards to people dont know how to use a keyboard, but I cant find the video with Google. It was during an interview with Walt Mossberg. [2]https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=3102 https://youtu.be/IiuVggWNqSA?t=3102
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not. Wasn't this one of the reasons why Solitaire was included with Windows 3: to teach people about using a mouse?

slantyyz 7y ago

I'm kinda jealous of your experience. My dad (early 80s) struggles with tech in general, including the iPad and iPhone. Many in his peer group use touchscreen devices with fewer issues. This is what I noticed from trying to teach him how to use the interfaces: 1 - He refuses to mentally process what the icons represent and ignores the text label below them. I thought switching them to Chinese would help, but he'd struggle with some of the terms, as they were unfamiliar to him. For a person his age and background, "address book" is more meaningful than "contacts". 2 - He wants to memorize locations and steps as opposed to using intuition via #1. This sometimes helped, but there would be occasional pitfalls, i.e., an unintentional gesture pulls him out of what he's doing and then he just doesn't doesn't know how to get back. I tried switching him to an old school feature phone (one of the newer Nokia remakes), but even that's a struggle, as there's simply too much UI, and I notice rocker buttons confuse the hell out of him. Many of these devices are marketed to seniors (and pretty much have the same interface and functions) but I don't think they were really tested with seniors. My dad doesn't have or use the Internet, and he's starting to get left behind as large companies are trying to move away from snail mail for things like bills, etc.

ryandrake 7y ago
The "Address Book" vs. "Contacts" one is a good example. The one that hits some of the non-techies I know is "Drive". More than a handful of people I know still confuse it with Maps. They are going to drive to the next town over, and want directions, so obviously they look for Google Drive. I'd guess 99% of the population associates the word "Drive" with cars and driving, and 1% associates it with "internal storage" yet what did we geeks decide?
- slantyyz 7y ago
  While I get that designers hate skeuomorphism, I tend to think there are still significant benefits to it with seniors. With my dad in particular, if the icons were literally photos (as opposed to "graphically designed" icons) of real world objects he was familiar with, I think it would help... a little. He doesn't seem to process abstractions very well. For example, a shadowed head in a contacts icon has absolutely zero meaning for him. Even with non-touchscreen UI's, such as a media player, my dad doesn't quite grasp the concept of a highlighted item no matter how many times I try to explain it to him. It gets even more confusing for him if the highlight changes color in different parts of the UI. It would be nice if voice ui's were more advanced, but he speaks a dialect of Chinese that's much less common than Mandarin or Cantonese, so there's another issue.

ajmurmann 7y ago

I've found the very small bezel on newer iPads to be a problem for my parents in their 60s. Since I got them a new iPad they frequently will accidentally exit FaceTime while talking to them and then not know how to get back. The unintuitive multi-tasking is actually an advantage for them. It's hard to accidentally end up in that mode and they wouldn't have a need to ever use it. If it was easier to get into multi-tasking, they likely would only want to know how to stop it.