5 ms·

PawPawMail - Email for the Elderly

35 points by rjurney 18y ago

rjurney 18y ago
This is one of the best uses of simple, clean interfaces I have ever seen. I tried it out yesterday, and it really looks like something a computer inept grandparent could use. Kids or younger family manage the email account for their grandparents, filling in profile information and pictures, so the elderly user's interface is devoid of anything that could be confusing. Its just very simple email and photos. The result... if my grandparents were still alive, I could be emailing with them. Thats profound value. I love this product. No association, I just think its great.
ibsulon 18y ago
The only concern I have is the privacy implications. Knowing your caretaker is reading your email could be detrimental in many cases.
- rjurney 18y ago
  I think its a family product, so much of the communication will be between the administrator (son, daughter, nephew) and elderly person, and family and intended to be public in that group anyway. I think the bottom line is that without the help of a caretaker, the elderly this is aimed at won't use email.
rjh232 18y ago
I'm one of the developers -- we're trying to get as much feedback as we can get, so please let us know your thoughts, good or (especially) bad. As far as privacy, the caretaker ("Manager" is the term we're using for the application) only screens incoming mail when it is NOT from someone already in the address book. We hope that that minimizes the concern, even though it clearly doesn't entirely negate it.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  This is essentially the idea that we've been applying to seed funding firms with. The market for products for the elderly is huge, and software firms largely don't care about it. So, I think it is a great idea (haven't looked at your implementation yet). I'll share with you one insight we had from our brainstorming sessions: we thought it would be a good idea to make the product a desktop email client that runs on startup rather than a web page (tagline: "Outlook for the elderly. Except it doesn't suck like Outlook."). I just remember how difficult it was for my father to learn how to find the browser, open the browser, go to gmail, remember his password, etc. And yet for many users, email is 90%+ of what they use their computer for. There's no reason it should be complicated (or use small fonts!). However, making a website probably entails less up-front investment and allows you to test the market. It's a great idea, and I wish more people would focus on this underserved market.
  - derwiki 18y ago
    I think making it a desktop client is a great idea. My father is still inherently a little less trusting of "the internet" and web browsers, but he's fine with using an application for email. It sounds sort of silly.. but if that's what it takes to crack the elderly market, it's worth looking into. Great idea for a product!
    - rjurney 18y ago
      I think an appliance is the ideal end-product. Gift gramps email in a box, a very limited, PawPaw specific notebook. All it does is email and photos.
      - jacoblyles 18y ago
        Picwing is something like this.
    - RKlophaus 18y ago
      I would package this as a "desktop app" that is really just a thin shell around WebKit or System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser. Grandpa thinks it's a desktop app and has a single icon to click on, but from a development and maintenance perspective you get all the benefits of the web.
- jrockway 18y ago
  When I visit the site, it says: "Alternate HTML content should be placed here. This content requires the Adobe Flash Player. Get Flash." Do all elderly people have Flash?
  - rjh232 18y ago
    No; and the user interface is entirely built for the Flash player, which might limit it somewhat in its reach. Our thought is that they are unlikely to need PawPawMail in the first place if they have a home computer that they are completely capable of using without a small degree of setup by a friend/manager.
- jsdalton 18y ago
  Nicely done, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. The interfaces for the product look great. My one suggestion would be to do some work on the interface of your website itself. Given what you've done on the application interface I'm sure you guys are capable of better. (Had this link not been from HN I most certainly would not have given this product the time of day, based on the website.)
  - rjh232 18y ago
    Thanks! I agree that the website itself needs some work; the landing page is intentionally underdeveloped to direct active users to their interfaces, but it needs an overhaul. Anyone have any specific design tips for implementation?
- ConradHex 18y ago
  It's clear this has a market. I did want to point out that my own grandparents are 75-ish, and use gmail just fine, and have a blog that they update regularly. So I'm not sure if this market will be increasing, or decreasing. Over a long enough time frame, I think it probably will be decreasing, as more tech-savvy users get older.
  - rjurney 18y ago
    Domestically... I think you're right. But what about internationally? I know lots of Indian immigrants that would love to have their elderly parents back in India using this. Is the number of computer inept grandparents with internet access shrinking or growing, globally?
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    We got this objection a lot. My father's generation has another 20 or 30 years of life expectancy given current technology. I think it's a little silly to write off a huge, underserved market because you only have two or three decades to sell to it. By that time, one ought to be able to move on to their second product. Also, my father's generation is more used to paying for things of value compared to my generation. It could be a good market.
  - rdouble 18y ago
    I was going to make a similar comment. My grandparents are mid-80s and have been using email for at least 14 years. My grandmother would be insulted if someone suggested she switched to the simplified elderly email service. However, she experienced a drastic decline in vision last year and now has someone read her email to her. The market for older people who need a different mail client because they don't know how to use email is probably on the decline. But, the market for older people who need a different mail client because their eyes are going bad or they can't type well anymore is probably on the rise. One other comment is that PawPawMail sounds like you are marketing to grandfathers. In my limited experience, the grandmothers (and aunts, moms, daughters) send far more email.
saroush 18y ago
We set my grandfather up with an account, and I've emailed back and forth with him. He still writes emails like they're telegrams, but at least he can write them at all now. And the photo album is awesome.
novum 18y ago
Thanks to pawpawmail, I now know that the pawpaw fruit looks awfully like a green peanut.
- Femur 18y ago
  These fruits actually taste really good too. As a native to Missouri, I have eaten these several times right off the tree while on hikes. They taste quite a bit like a banana and have huge seeds. It is also North America's largest native tree fruit.
  - catz 18y ago
    I agree with you that it tastes nice. However, either your bananas taste different or your pawpaws taste different - it doesn't taste like a banana at all!
- rjh232 18y ago
  Also entertaining: its flowers smell like rotten meat. see http://www.hort.cornell.edu/extension/commercial/fruit/mfruit/pawpaw.html http://www.hort.cornell.edu/extension/commercial/fruit/mfrui...
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  I should mention that growing up in North Carolina my grandfather was always known as Pawpaw to me and my family. (Or should I say kin?) My other grandfather was Papa. Made it easy to keep track of who was who :) I've never met anyone outside the American South who could pronounce it properly. As soon as I heard the name "PawPawMail" I knew exactly what the product was for. Excellent naming.
- Splines 18y ago
  Outside the U.S., the term "pawpaw" can sometimes refer to the papaya. How's that for confusing?
dschobel 18y ago
It's a useful idea but I think solving the "email is hard" problem is secondary to the "managing a computer is hard" problem. I've tried setting up fool-proof systems for elderly family members in the past. All the applications and URLs they would ever need were sitting right on the desktop, anti-virus and windows automatically patching themselves, etc. It only ever last a few weeks until they started downloading attachments from their marginally more savvy friends for it all to come crashing down. From my experience I would say extending this into a suite which allowed full remote (with no RDP setup required) maintenance and solving the end-to-end problem would be more compelling. But this is definitely a good start.
- rjurney 18y ago
  I built a firefox/ubuntu point of sale once, and all it did was launch to firefox which was quite hard to get out of, and went to one url. Something like that could work.
jasongullickson 18y ago
Make it run on the Wii and you have a hit.
- Splines 18y ago
  I don't know if you're being facetious, but asking an elderly person to point a wii-mote to type an email isn't likely to work. I've tried using Opera for Wii and it's a pain to type anything more than 5-10 chars, and impossible to type more than 2-3 without making a mistake. A simple wireless keyboard could probably work, connected to a PC that has autologon and a browser set to autostart as well. I don't normally use the "Email" "Web Search" etc. buttons on those multimedia keyboards, but they seem like a good solution for the elderly.
  - jasongullickson 18y ago
    It was semi-facetious, but in all seriousness, the Wii is one of the first game consoles (ie, computers) with serious uptake by the AARP crowd. I agree that the keyboard issue would need to be addressed, but I imagine it could be bundled as an accessory ala-Wii Fit. Perhaps this app already works in the Wii's browser? I don't know if it does Flash.
Katia 18y ago
I think this is an awesome idea! I am a big fan! and for those who commennted on its international appeal - as i know it, it will be available in a various languages!
vaksel 18y ago
since you are targeting the elderly, you should use bigger fonts
- latortuga 18y ago
  I can't upvote this enough, I read your headline and went to your site and had a huge WTF moment when I saw all these small fonts. I feel like you may not understand your market.
- rms 18y ago
  Also the highest contrast non-obnoxious color scheme possible. the current scheme looks nice and non threatening but is not as easy to read as black on white.
- paul7986 18y ago
  Also just have in big fonts sign up under the forms to create username and password that should be right on the frontpage. If username is not available generate under form in big letters username taken please try a different username. Same with password instructions and or warnings. good luck!
- scott_s 18y ago
  I didn't try to use the application itself, but this site is not targeted to the elderly. It's targeted to the family members of an elderly person. If an elderly person is reading this page, they probably don't need to use the application. Now, the application itself should probably use big fonts.
jpwagner 18y ago
April Fools day was a week ago...
rjurney 18y ago
Old people will die more frequently than others, so with year long subscriptions you'll have a not insignificant pre-paid user death rate as you scale. Still, its probably bad form to mention this in your business plan as contributing to lower hosting costs per user due to decreased-deceased usage.
TweedHeads 18y ago
Great idea to serve the elders. Two gripes: $5 a month? nobody pays for email, you're killing your future growth right off the bat. Set it free, once you have a million users use the landing page as news outlet and ad market. Flash? WTF?
- jasonkester 18y ago
  I think you're projecting. Maybe you don't pay for things, and that's fine. But older people remember the time when things cost money, and are actually happy to purchase things that they find useful. I know that my mother would be happy to spend $5/month to keep her mother connected to email.
frossie 18y ago
It's a good idea - but I am surprised it is not marketed for little kids too. I have the reverse problem - the grandparents (who get by on gmail) are demanding that my 2 year old (!) have her own email address to send her pictures and so on (she can't read!). Right now I am fobbing them off with an alias that forwards to my own email so I can screen it, but I can see that a service like this would work really well for that. There are some services geared to "kid e-mail", so I don't think it is a bad idea to target seniors as a first step, but this seems to me to also be an excellent solution to the kid problem. Kids don't need anywhere the eye candy that gets thrown at them - they just need clear consistent workflow.
gilesgoatboy 18y ago
My elderly (my parents) follow me on Twitter and were using Skype two years before I was. My dad uses Facebook more than I do. Whatever the problem is with elderly people and technology, it's not been a problem for my parents at all. I don't think I have any useful lesson for the mass market here, just a personal observation, although I definitely have seen loads of people stymied by usability fail, both old and young, and I think any company which successfully grabbed the senior market would have to rock at usability. There's a whole language of UI idioms which is so transparent to us we don't even realize we're using it, and it's very confusing to those who aren't fluent.

35 points by rjurney 18y ago

This is one of the best uses of simple, clean interfaces I have ever seen. I tried it out yesterday, and it really looks like something a computer inept grandparent could use. Kids or younger family manage the email account for their grandparents, filling in profile information and pictures, so the elderly user's interface is devoid of anything that could be confusing. Its just very simple email and photos. The result... if my grandparents were still alive, I could be emailing with them. Thats profound value. I love this product. No association, I just think its great.

ibsulon 18y ago

The only concern I have is the privacy implications. Knowing your caretaker is reading your email could be detrimental in many cases.

rjurney 18y ago
I think its a family product, so much of the communication will be between the administrator (son, daughter, nephew) and elderly person, and family and intended to be public in that group anyway. I think the bottom line is that without the help of a caretaker, the elderly this is aimed at won't use email.

rjh232 18y ago

I'm one of the developers -- we're trying to get as much feedback as we can get, so please let us know your thoughts, good or (especially) bad. As far as privacy, the caretaker ("Manager" is the term we're using for the application) only screens incoming mail when it is NOT from someone already in the address book. We hope that that minimizes the concern, even though it clearly doesn't entirely negate it.

jacoblyles 18y ago
This is essentially the idea that we've been applying to seed funding firms with. The market for products for the elderly is huge, and software firms largely don't care about it. So, I think it is a great idea (haven't looked at your implementation yet). I'll share with you one insight we had from our brainstorming sessions: we thought it would be a good idea to make the product a desktop email client that runs on startup rather than a web page (tagline: "Outlook for the elderly. Except it doesn't suck like Outlook."). I just remember how difficult it was for my father to learn how to find the browser, open the browser, go to gmail, remember his password, etc. And yet for many users, email is 90%+ of what they use their computer for. There's no reason it should be complicated (or use small fonts!). However, making a website probably entails less up-front investment and allows you to test the market. It's a great idea, and I wish more people would focus on this underserved market.
- derwiki 18y ago
  I think making it a desktop client is a great idea. My father is still inherently a little less trusting of "the internet" and web browsers, but he's fine with using an application for email. It sounds sort of silly.. but if that's what it takes to crack the elderly market, it's worth looking into. Great idea for a product!
  - rjurney 18y ago
    I think an appliance is the ideal end-product. Gift gramps email in a box, a very limited, PawPaw specific notebook. All it does is email and photos.
    - jacoblyles 18y ago
      Picwing is something like this.
  - RKlophaus 18y ago
    I would package this as a "desktop app" that is really just a thin shell around WebKit or System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser. Grandpa thinks it's a desktop app and has a single icon to click on, but from a development and maintenance perspective you get all the benefits of the web.
jrockway 18y ago
When I visit the site, it says: "Alternate HTML content should be placed here. This content requires the Adobe Flash Player. Get Flash." Do all elderly people have Flash?
- rjh232 18y ago
  No; and the user interface is entirely built for the Flash player, which might limit it somewhat in its reach. Our thought is that they are unlikely to need PawPawMail in the first place if they have a home computer that they are completely capable of using without a small degree of setup by a friend/manager.
jsdalton 18y ago
Nicely done, I think this is an exceptionally good idea. The interfaces for the product look great. My one suggestion would be to do some work on the interface of your website itself. Given what you've done on the application interface I'm sure you guys are capable of better. (Had this link not been from HN I most certainly would not have given this product the time of day, based on the website.)
- rjh232 18y ago
  Thanks! I agree that the website itself needs some work; the landing page is intentionally underdeveloped to direct active users to their interfaces, but it needs an overhaul. Anyone have any specific design tips for implementation?
ConradHex 18y ago
It's clear this has a market. I did want to point out that my own grandparents are 75-ish, and use gmail just fine, and have a blog that they update regularly. So I'm not sure if this market will be increasing, or decreasing. Over a long enough time frame, I think it probably will be decreasing, as more tech-savvy users get older.
- rjurney 18y ago
  Domestically... I think you're right. But what about internationally? I know lots of Indian immigrants that would love to have their elderly parents back in India using this. Is the number of computer inept grandparents with internet access shrinking or growing, globally?
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  We got this objection a lot. My father's generation has another 20 or 30 years of life expectancy given current technology. I think it's a little silly to write off a huge, underserved market because you only have two or three decades to sell to it. By that time, one ought to be able to move on to their second product. Also, my father's generation is more used to paying for things of value compared to my generation. It could be a good market.
- rdouble 18y ago
  I was going to make a similar comment. My grandparents are mid-80s and have been using email for at least 14 years. My grandmother would be insulted if someone suggested she switched to the simplified elderly email service. However, she experienced a drastic decline in vision last year and now has someone read her email to her. The market for older people who need a different mail client because they don't know how to use email is probably on the decline. But, the market for older people who need a different mail client because their eyes are going bad or they can't type well anymore is probably on the rise. One other comment is that PawPawMail sounds like you are marketing to grandfathers. In my limited experience, the grandmothers (and aunts, moms, daughters) send far more email.

saroush 18y ago

We set my grandfather up with an account, and I've emailed back and forth with him. He still writes emails like they're telegrams, but at least he can write them at all now. And the photo album is awesome.

novum 18y ago

Thanks to pawpawmail, I now know that the pawpaw fruit looks awfully like a green peanut.

Femur 18y ago
These fruits actually taste really good too. As a native to Missouri, I have eaten these several times right off the tree while on hikes. They taste quite a bit like a banana and have huge seeds. It is also North America's largest native tree fruit.
- catz 18y ago
  I agree with you that it tastes nice. However, either your bananas taste different or your pawpaws taste different - it doesn't taste like a banana at all!
rjh232 18y ago
Also entertaining: its flowers smell like rotten meat. see http://www.hort.cornell.edu/extension/commercial/fruit/mfruit/pawpaw.html http://www.hort.cornell.edu/extension/commercial/fruit/mfrui...
LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
I should mention that growing up in North Carolina my grandfather was always known as Pawpaw to me and my family. (Or should I say kin?) My other grandfather was Papa. Made it easy to keep track of who was who :) I've never met anyone outside the American South who could pronounce it properly. As soon as I heard the name "PawPawMail" I knew exactly what the product was for. Excellent naming.
Splines 18y ago
Outside the U.S., the term "pawpaw" can sometimes refer to the papaya. How's that for confusing?

dschobel 18y ago

It's a useful idea but I think solving the "email is hard" problem is secondary to the "managing a computer is hard" problem. I've tried setting up fool-proof systems for elderly family members in the past. All the applications and URLs they would ever need were sitting right on the desktop, anti-virus and windows automatically patching themselves, etc. It only ever last a few weeks until they started downloading attachments from their marginally more savvy friends for it all to come crashing down. From my experience I would say extending this into a suite which allowed full remote (with no RDP setup required) maintenance and solving the end-to-end problem would be more compelling. But this is definitely a good start.

rjurney 18y ago
I built a firefox/ubuntu point of sale once, and all it did was launch to firefox which was quite hard to get out of, and went to one url. Something like that could work.

jasongullickson 18y ago

Make it run on the Wii and you have a hit.

Splines 18y ago
I don't know if you're being facetious, but asking an elderly person to point a wii-mote to type an email isn't likely to work. I've tried using Opera for Wii and it's a pain to type anything more than 5-10 chars, and impossible to type more than 2-3 without making a mistake. A simple wireless keyboard could probably work, connected to a PC that has autologon and a browser set to autostart as well. I don't normally use the "Email" "Web Search" etc. buttons on those multimedia keyboards, but they seem like a good solution for the elderly.
- jasongullickson 18y ago
  It was semi-facetious, but in all seriousness, the Wii is one of the first game consoles (ie, computers) with serious uptake by the AARP crowd. I agree that the keyboard issue would need to be addressed, but I imagine it could be bundled as an accessory ala-Wii Fit. Perhaps this app already works in the Wii's browser? I don't know if it does Flash.

Katia 18y ago

I think this is an awesome idea! I am a big fan! and for those who commennted on its international appeal - as i know it, it will be available in a various languages!

vaksel 18y ago

since you are targeting the elderly, you should use bigger fonts

latortuga 18y ago
I can't upvote this enough, I read your headline and went to your site and had a huge WTF moment when I saw all these small fonts. I feel like you may not understand your market.
rms 18y ago
Also the highest contrast non-obnoxious color scheme possible. the current scheme looks nice and non threatening but is not as easy to read as black on white.
paul7986 18y ago
Also just have in big fonts sign up under the forms to create username and password that should be right on the frontpage. If username is not available generate under form in big letters username taken please try a different username. Same with password instructions and or warnings. good luck!
scott_s 18y ago
I didn't try to use the application itself, but this site is not targeted to the elderly. It's targeted to the family members of an elderly person. If an elderly person is reading this page, they probably don't need to use the application. Now, the application itself should probably use big fonts.

jpwagner 18y ago

April Fools day was a week ago...

rjurney 18y ago

Old people will die more frequently than others, so with year long subscriptions you'll have a not insignificant pre-paid user death rate as you scale. Still, its probably bad form to mention this in your business plan as contributing to lower hosting costs per user due to decreased-deceased usage.

TweedHeads 18y ago

Great idea to serve the elders. Two gripes: $5 a month? nobody pays for email, you're killing your future growth right off the bat. Set it free, once you have a million users use the landing page as news outlet and ad market. Flash? WTF?

jasonkester 18y ago
I think you're projecting. Maybe you don't pay for things, and that's fine. But older people remember the time when things cost money, and are actually happy to purchase things that they find useful. I know that my mother would be happy to spend $5/month to keep her mother connected to email.

frossie 18y ago

It's a good idea - but I am surprised it is not marketed for little kids too. I have the reverse problem - the grandparents (who get by on gmail) are demanding that my 2 year old (!) have her own email address to send her pictures and so on (she can't read!). Right now I am fobbing them off with an alias that forwards to my own email so I can screen it, but I can see that a service like this would work really well for that. There are some services geared to "kid e-mail", so I don't think it is a bad idea to target seniors as a first step, but this seems to me to also be an excellent solution to the kid problem. Kids don't need anywhere the eye candy that gets thrown at them - they just need clear consistent workflow.

gilesgoatboy 18y ago

My elderly (my parents) follow me on Twitter and were using Skype two years before I was. My dad uses Facebook more than I do. Whatever the problem is with elderly people and technology, it's not been a problem for my parents at all. I don't think I have any useful lesson for the mass market here, just a personal observation, although I definitely have seen loads of people stymied by usability fail, both old and young, and I think any company which successfully grabbed the senior market would have to rock at usability. There's a whole language of UI idioms which is so transparent to us we don't even realize we're using it, and it's very confusing to those who aren't fluent.