4 ms·

Thank you, so much for pointing this out so succinctly. I'm a 59 year old engineer (originally electrical, but got a bit into software engineering and have been

Thank you, so much for pointing this out so succinctly. I'm a 59 year old engineer (originally electrical, but got a bit into software engineering and have been doing enterprise network and security design deployments for the last 30 years). With very aged parents and a mother-in-law all over 85, I have more and more become aware of the absolutely horrible user interfaces that abound all over the place. Smart phone and web based offerings to do basic tasks of interacting with government, bank, shopping and similar services literally are unusable in many if not most cases for most over 70. ( My loved ones all have used PCs since the 1990s). Banners blot huge chunks of screen real estate, metaphors for selection and entry of data change within a services pages let alone between them, active screen objects may as well be hidden. When I retire from full-time work, I almost feel like I should make it my mission to front up to these organisations and "pretend" I'm their typical user or customer that they are not serving very well at all, and put a rocket up them demanding why with all their technical and designer resources they should have at their disposal why they can't provide a useful and satisfying user experience.

survirtual 4y ago
If you created a document of design guidelines that you could simply link in response to posts like this, it might actually go a long way. I would be glad to read about what you’ve learned about user interfaces and the considerations necessary to include the elderly with regards to accessibility, and would certainly bookmark it / utilize it / consider it when creating UI. I’d imagine others would also. If anyone else has such a thing, I would encourage you to share.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  The original Human Interface Guidelines from Apple were the golden example of good design. Research-based concrete rules for everything (including designing custom UI elements), resulting in a coherent and useable GUI UX.
  - phlummox 4y ago
    [dead]
kmlx 4y ago
> Smart phone and web based offerings to do basic tasks of interacting with government, bank, shopping and similar services literally are unusable in many if not most cases for most over 70. been working on the web for ~20 years now. the amount of debugging, switching devices, just general hacks i need to do in order to interact with certain websites is a bit crazy: - open my desktop browser - open a specific browser - disable all extensions - open a new private tab - inspect element with the dev tools - js breakpoints and fixing minified js code on the fly - removing or adding css - allow location/camera/etc permissions all so that i can press a button on a website :)) i’ve always worked in small teams. and we always tested on all the browsers, on all the devices. manually and automatically. and this is every time we deployed. how some of these broken websites get to see the light of day is just unreal.
- tester457 4y ago
  Are these websites big, or small local things?
  - kmlx 4y ago
    huge, big, small, all of them, startup, fortune 500, international bank, local government services. errors occur due to a huge number of reasons: ISPs, lack of testing, connection issues, outdated tech, cdns, certificates, javascript, js minifiers, assumptions made by devs/po’s. basically the web is so huge and complex that websites will fail in any random number of ways.

survirtual 4y ago

If you created a document of design guidelines that you could simply link in response to posts like this, it might actually go a long way. I would be glad to read about what you’ve learned about user interfaces and the considerations necessary to include the elderly with regards to accessibility, and would certainly bookmark it / utilize it / consider it when creating UI. I’d imagine others would also. If anyone else has such a thing, I would encourage you to share.

voakbasda 4y ago
The original Human Interface Guidelines from Apple were the golden example of good design. Research-based concrete rules for everything (including designing custom UI elements), resulting in a coherent and useable GUI UX.
- phlummox 4y ago
  [dead]

kmlx 4y ago

> Smart phone and web based offerings to do basic tasks of interacting with government, bank, shopping and similar services literally are unusable in many if not most cases for most over 70. been working on the web for ~20 years now. the amount of debugging, switching devices, just general hacks i need to do in order to interact with certain websites is a bit crazy: - open my desktop browser - open a specific browser - disable all extensions - open a new private tab - inspect element with the dev tools - js breakpoints and fixing minified js code on the fly - removing or adding css - allow location/camera/etc permissions all so that i can press a button on a website :)) i’ve always worked in small teams. and we always tested on all the browsers, on all the devices. manually and automatically. and this is every time we deployed. how some of these broken websites get to see the light of day is just unreal.

tester457 4y ago
Are these websites big, or small local things?
- kmlx 4y ago
  huge, big, small, all of them, startup, fortune 500, international bank, local government services. errors occur due to a huge number of reasons: ISPs, lack of testing, connection issues, outdated tech, cdns, certificates, javascript, js minifiers, assumptions made by devs/po’s. basically the web is so huge and complex that websites will fail in any random number of ways.