9 ms·
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
by 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 agoThe "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 agoWhile 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.
- _red 7y agoFor the life of me, I can't understand how neither IOS nor Android offers some type of "Simple UI" setting. It should only consist of 4 Icons: Call, Email, Text, Web It is a crazily under-served market.
- slantyyz 7y agoThere are launchers for Android, but they don't work perfectly. For me, the only icons I would need is "Call", "Answer" and "Silent". Of course, that begs the question, why not use a "feature phone", but their UIs are muddled and overdesigned these days too.
- downtide 7y agoI have this odd contacts thing. Start there for calls and chats, or start with a call or chat then find the contact? Not so simple.