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Love this thread idea, had been considering posting one myself. - Tablets for seniors: when the elderly population sees an iPad ad, they're not captivated or e

by pkfrank 12y ago

Love this thread idea, had been considering posting one myself. - Tablets for seniors: when the elderly population sees an iPad ad, they're not captivated or entranced; they're intimidated and disappointed that they're left behind by technology. I envision the "jitterbug for tablets" -- built on Android with big, tactile buttons; a 'never get lost, take me home' feature; remotely controlled functionality (IE turn on/off apps); etc. They wouldn't use much bandwidth, so you could build 3G right into the device and charge a significant monthly premium -- after all, it's a dramatic quality-of-life improvement for someone sitting in a retirement home. GE and a few other companies are doing similar projects, but no one is really executing all that well IMO. Problems: would be super hard to get off the ground / defend, and the market is becoming increasingly obsolete.

omarforgotpwd 12y ago
Yes, it would probably be hard to get off the ground before all your potential customers died.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  The thing about old people is that they're making more of them every day.
  - x711Li 12y ago
    The old people 20 years from now will not be the same as the ones today. Rampant tech consumption among the newer generations will purge the need.
    - fiatmoney 12y ago
      The obvious business model is making the technology-du-jour accessible, not tablets in particular.
booruguru 12y ago
I don't get it. I thought the main selling point of an iPad is that it's even easier than a Mac. I mean, how much easier could a tablet be?
- thebenedict 12y ago
  A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology. Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.
  - guywithabike 12y ago
    The problem is that to simplify an interface further after a certain point, you need to remove features. But the features you remove will be inessential to some people but absolutely essential to others. Even if you've reduced your target market to "the elderly who want to use email to send and receive pictures", you've still got a huge pile of features that you'll never reduce far enough to make it simple for everyone.
  - michaelmior 12y ago
    It seems like most of the problems you mention could be solved by just having apps with a more friendly UI as opposed to manufacturing a new device.
mileszim 12y ago
Check out http://www.grandpad.net/ http://www.grandpad.net/ Some awesome friends of mine at Chapman University have been building exactly that: a tablet for seniors.
koopajah 12y ago
We bought a tactile desktop computer designed for elder people (www.ordimemo.com) for my grandmother 3 years ago. She loved it... at first. The idea of receiving emails and pictures from all of us and having access to "the internet" really pleased her. But after a few months she kind of stopped using it because it had too many issues. I'm going to list some of them in case it gave ideas to people: * based on IE7 so a lot of websites don't work/render properly. This does not seem important when the core of your users go on google/wikipedia and that's it. But my grandmother loves to order online but is limited to amazon because most of the other websites don't work properly. She would gladly pay more to be able to simplify most of the main websites UI for her and ease her order flow. * Impossible to have more than one tab. This seems logical at first because it simplifies everything, but when she is ordering something as a gift and wants to look for an address she has to close the whole application and go in "notebook" and start over again. Same with the idea of having multiple tabs in IE. * Email services really limited. Their idea is to avoid spam you have to whitelist every email address. But this is not negotiable, so when you order for the first time online you can't use your system's email because you'll never get the "confirm your email address". Or you use a gmail account for this which immediately make things too complicated for her. * Most of the other features (games especially) are really limited/dumb such as having to recognize a banana. Creating games for her is something I'm planning to do but with the old browser inside the machine it makes things harder. * Pictures management! We all send pictures to her by email but she can't organize them at all. I've been thinking of a UI for this but when I draw it/explain it I immediately see she would be completely lost. She needs a simple UI on top of explorer of something that would do "delete, crop, move, rename, add comments". And on top of that the main feature she needs is "print it for me and mail it to me". Websites already exist for this feature but she would have to understand how to upload photos and then use them which is clearly impossible. * Keyboard! Another big issue for her is being able to raise her arms high enough for a long period of time to type an email on the screen with the tactile keyboard. At the same time, the keyboard delivered with the computer is not in alphabetical order. I've been trying to teach her but it takes her a long time to write so she mostly gives up and limit herself to a few words! Hope this helps!

by pkfrank 12y ago

omarforgotpwd 12y ago

Yes, it would probably be hard to get off the ground before all your potential customers died.

fiatmoney 12y ago
The thing about old people is that they're making more of them every day.
- x711Li 12y ago
  The old people 20 years from now will not be the same as the ones today. Rampant tech consumption among the newer generations will purge the need.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    The obvious business model is making the technology-du-jour accessible, not tablets in particular.

booruguru 12y ago

I don't get it. I thought the main selling point of an iPad is that it's even easier than a Mac. I mean, how much easier could a tablet be?

thebenedict 12y ago
A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology. Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.
- guywithabike 12y ago
  The problem is that to simplify an interface further after a certain point, you need to remove features. But the features you remove will be inessential to some people but absolutely essential to others. Even if you've reduced your target market to "the elderly who want to use email to send and receive pictures", you've still got a huge pile of features that you'll never reduce far enough to make it simple for everyone.
- michaelmior 12y ago
  It seems like most of the problems you mention could be solved by just having apps with a more friendly UI as opposed to manufacturing a new device.

mileszim 12y ago

Check out http://www.grandpad.net/ http://www.grandpad.net/ Some awesome friends of mine at Chapman University have been building exactly that: a tablet for seniors.

koopajah 12y ago

We bought a tactile desktop computer designed for elder people (www.ordimemo.com) for my grandmother 3 years ago. She loved it... at first. The idea of receiving emails and pictures from all of us and having access to "the internet" really pleased her. But after a few months she kind of stopped using it because it had too many issues. I'm going to list some of them in case it gave ideas to people: * based on IE7 so a lot of websites don't work/render properly. This does not seem important when the core of your users go on google/wikipedia and that's it. But my grandmother loves to order online but is limited to amazon because most of the other websites don't work properly. She would gladly pay more to be able to simplify most of the main websites UI for her and ease her order flow. * Impossible to have more than one tab. This seems logical at first because it simplifies everything, but when she is ordering something as a gift and wants to look for an address she has to close the whole application and go in "notebook" and start over again. Same with the idea of having multiple tabs in IE. * Email services really limited. Their idea is to avoid spam you have to whitelist every email address. But this is not negotiable, so when you order for the first time online you can't use your system's email because you'll never get the "confirm your email address". Or you use a gmail account for this which immediately make things too complicated for her. * Most of the other features (games especially) are really limited/dumb such as having to recognize a banana. Creating games for her is something I'm planning to do but with the old browser inside the machine it makes things harder. * Pictures management! We all send pictures to her by email but she can't organize them at all. I've been thinking of a UI for this but when I draw it/explain it I immediately see she would be completely lost. She needs a simple UI on top of explorer of something that would do "delete, crop, move, rename, add comments". And on top of that the main feature she needs is "print it for me and mail it to me". Websites already exist for this feature but she would have to understand how to upload photos and then use them which is clearly impossible. * Keyboard! Another big issue for her is being able to raise her arms high enough for a long period of time to type an email on the screen with the tactile keyboard. At the same time, the keyboard delivered with the computer is not in alphabetical order. I've been trying to teach her but it takes her a long time to write so she mostly gives up and limit herself to a few words! Hope this helps!