Don Norman on how design fails older consumers
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Much to my surprise, the hearing aid app does not adjust it's font size per the iOS system settings, and it does not have any font adjustment of it's own. It also has a background picture that interferes with focusing on controls. I'm boggled that a company producing a product for those with hearing-impairment doesn't recognize that many of it's users may be in age-related decline, and that can include vision and cognitive impairment.
I'd probably contact the app authors themselves first, though. It might happen that the issue is resolved quickly with no confrontation.
Same with desk phones. Anyone who deals with customers at a counter doesn't have time to constantly look at a touch screen for buttons that may or may not be there. Nothing like chucking muscle memory out the window in the name of aesthetics :p
Now imagine your grandfather using an iPad, while also driving.
Unfortunately accessibility & haptics have been pushed to the backburner.
You can control the radio of any high-end 00's car without looking at the controls.
Auto air conditioning was a great luxury to have, especially in the deep south on a multi-hour tollway through wilderness with no exits for miles on either side of the pavement.
Of course gasoline was still commonly available with over 100 octane rating for prices less expensive than milk.
And most cars had a regular ordinary V8 engine.
On the typical GM car, AC controls were like this:
https://www.rickscamaros.com/productmedia/catalog_product_ga...
Many drivers never went anywhere without their good buddies "MAX" and "NORM".
And this is what was in a Ford:
https://secure.cougarpartscatalog.com/c9zz-19a884-a.html
Notice how there is only one sliding selector for all the main exclusive functions, each well separated physically and tactically and labeled well. Each company has almost the same identical functions arranged with a similar but not identical order and nomenclature. Regardless each company shows a logical spectrum of functions from left-to-right.
The other continuous slider is for temperature, and a third slider on an opposing axis for the fan setting (closer to the driver when center-mounted) since that's the one you change most often. Other than the fan, the other settings often remain unchanged across multiple rides in the most ideal expected usage scenarios.
Obviously Max was quite popular with both Ford and GM, and it seems intuitively instinctive as the most cold you are going to get, but it's really just the Recirculate setting, while Norm is for Fresh outside air coming in across your cooling coils, which is what it says on the Ford.
All of this being fully documented in the handy owner's manual in the glove compartment, but even the least technically oriented people usually figured it all out quite easily on their own. Without even looking. If you did have to page through the book at least it was (much) faster than a PDF.
You could say there is very great similarity between both of these major competing control panels, or alternatively maybe there are only superficial differences in these co-operating engineering approaches.
The temperature can be completely set tactically across the entire range with no unanticipated discomfort, even though there is no thermostat, you are simply choosing across a continuous range of what is available under the prevailing environmental conditions. Which therefore required occasional tweaking en route, on this type of early 70s fully-analog system this critical physical adjustment was most-often accomplished when needed by real-time fine-motor actuation under the direct control of _usually_ natural intelligence. Yeah, there was some total system latency, with largely unavoidable contributions from this type of hardware, but occasionally the intelligence level itself was not up to even average expectations which can add the most noticable deficiency. Some things never change.
On some Cadillacs there was an actual system thermostat handled transparently by the same control panel, and when "digital" there was a fancy numerical indicator but you didn't need to take your eyes off the road to set the temperature as exactly as you would like using the same control panel either.
Well, that's most of the cars on the road having AC, Chrysler/AMC was much smaller and most imports were Volkswagens (without AC) still concentrated in and nearby port cities where there were foreign-car dealers, parts, and mechanics having metric tools. If you drove a Volkswagen micro-bus across a number of states to get to Woodstock in 1969, during most of the trip there was no expected source of repair, tools, or supplies, even tires.
Out on the Turnpike they had some good pavement designed for 100mph along all arcs (even when iced over as often as _that_ happens in Florida) but the regular two-lane roads out in the middle of nowhere were quite wavy after decades of overweight citrus trailers and going 100 on them was like constant air turbulence. It made your voice wavy while the occasional semi was bouncing toward you at 80mph themself. Sometimes when you are in their lane passing one of them simultaneously. The approaching big truck required a certain amount of pavement on your side of the center line since the roads were built when semis were narrower and there was not a lot of traffic out there way back then anyway.
At least the cars were over-engineered for better structural integrity (using a slide rule), but were mostly less capable of precise handling compared to 21st century offerings.
But you really didn't want to take your eyes off the road.
Well that was when Moon landings were a regular occurrence too, so you have to figure at certain times in history you had to be a lot further above average to get very far in engineering or technical areas compared to today.
Even though technology has come a long way over the decades (and centuries) in some ways (in some places) average people themselves were more advanced then compared to now.
A lot more effort is needed to build _foolproof_ systems simply because there are a lot more fools and they are getting more determined than ever.
This of course can be confirmed by direct observation over the long term.
There is still no indication that less-than-natural intelligence will ever be an adequate substitute when performing difficult (but commonly expected) efforts like in the old days. Especially when the natural stuff is trending downward at an increasing rate itself.
There was evolution. But it only happened when manufacturers would lose market share if they didn't do something that doesn't suck.
By its turn, nowadays cars are making it so that drivers must take their eyes out of the road to even look at the fucking speed indicator. We have seen some incredibly quick technology loss.
Fan, heat, vent dials or sliders, AC switch, recirc switch or selector.
It sucked the least.
https://kyozoufs.blob.core.windows.net/filestoragetcdb/Pictu...
This is correct and will drive style and purchasing decisions for the affluent in the future, if it isn't already.
A home full of wifi-connected "smart" appliances all (failing) to talk to one another will be a sign of poverty while a big hulking Traulsen[1] with no digital innards will (continue to) be a sign of wealth.
High end auto interior design, while currently dabbling with big silly (and obviously poorly designed) touchscreen interfaces, in an attempt to seem tesla-ish, will catch up as well.
It comes as a device with a usb connector. You plug it in and it works just like the software emulation but as a physical object.
No EE or embedded people required. A cheap software person could do this
For a low volume car like the Model 3, $3 million is already down to ~$12...
Is this so? I used to work at a Dunkin Donuts, and the POS / register was entirely touchscreen, and I and everyone else developed muscle memory.
The newer devices that I've seen are all touch screen and I dread that day. I'd rather reach over with muscle memory and press a physical button, while looking at something else like THE F-ing ROAD!
However, I do think the model 3 interface was heavily influenced by their self-driving ambitions. The technology hasn't caught up to the design yet, and it's a bit dangerous.
If you really used that clunky phone, you'd appreciate how at hand it is, and how fast it is to use compared to a cell phone, specially when you desk calls are short.
For me, the big takeaway from this article and companies like Discord is that people just don’t seem to care. And that’s often the status quo until an Apple comes along. We forget this, but back before the resurgence of Apple design was an afterthought, not a forethought even though there were obvious gains to be had and a better future to lead towards. But the vast majority of companies avoided the obvious win until Apple’s stock price shocked them into caring.
A significant fraction of everyone’s user base (including the core users) would benefit from accessible and thoughtful design, because like the article says, we’re all disabled sometimes. Now, we just need to figure out which company will have to show the world how to do it.
My team spends about a quarter of our time working strictly on accessibility, and we find ourselves straying from the beaten path often in order to accommodate a specific screenreader/OS combo. We run into situations all the time where we're unable to get insight from the docs because something is buried deep in the spec.
We also have to draw a line in the sand about which screenreaders to support and which ones to pass on, which pisses off clients that use screenreaders that we don't support.
Automated accessibility audit results sometimes contradict documentation around best practices, which can be frustrating.
The other thing I've learned is that developers usually hate working on accessibility issues because the screenreaders are much less intuitive to use and can really muck up your workflow if you're trying to ensure that an interface is completely accessible.
While I agree that we as a community can do better, I think that web accessibility in its current form is largely a failure because people see it as a cost that they're not interested in incurring, possibly because of the issues I've listed above.
Or is it too content/layout specific?
Eg: I might like to roll my own static blog, but I don't know how to ensure that it is accessible.
One of the things we've learned is that much of the complex, dynamic UI things one can do with frameworks like React/Angular is really, really, really hard and frustrating to make fully accessible because people never design React components that are easy to use with a keyboard.
We live in this world where the capabilities of UIs for enabled people continue to grow at the cost of accessibility for the disabled. With the shift towards frontend frameworks, the problem needs to be addressed at the markup level IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17869249
I really dislike SaaS vendors who are being control freaks. My browser, my rules. That was always the fundamental design of the Web.
> UPDATE Sept 14th 2018: After talks with folks from Slack and a rename… Refined (fka Taut) (fka BetterSlack) is now live back
Current generation Apple designers clearly have amazing vision: part numbers on light grey on white in microscopic fonts.
Tip: take a photo and view it in the photo app on your phone or desktop. It is often much easier to read then. If it is not, it can often be made so by playing with the editing options.
This also often works with things like power bricks that sometimes have the specs "printed" in raised plastic with no coloring to distinguish it from the rest of the case.
Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Magnifier -> On
Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut -> Magnifier
(of course those settings are somewhat inaccessi... well you know...)
Maybe even required by law - imagine a small-fine-print license agreement during setup that you cannot read.
Apple's online documentation pages have also tended to be light grey fonts on white. My eyes would ache trying to read them. I find their choices baffling. It's like they were so focused on design they forgot about people simply wanting to read it.
This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine. So many codes require digits and letters these days -- why not just digits?! It would be so much more user friendly, especially when using a smartphone keyboard.
My highly developed sense of old fartdom really comes out when dealing with modern cars with touchscreen displays.
Imagine if Uber did the same, support voiceover for their driver app (like why would a sightless person drive for Uber!) but ignore those with somewhat limited vision or are using the app in a fixed mount while driving, but are otherwise fine with driving vision.
Apple can be bad for this. Unfortunately the spindly little grey fonts floating in a sea of white or grey seems to be part of a broader design fashion at the moment. (Of course, I don't rule out that Apple played a role in kicking off this fashion.)
OMG, this has to be the worse fashion decision they've made. Let's use this thin, tiny, light-grey font to write over the shiny white plastic. Fuck you Apple.
It's like they're trying to alienate everyone not intimately familiar with the system and appeal to the lowest common denominator at the same time.
Sometimes the text label that would fit in English is too long when properly translated to another language.
(Icons are problem too: they can be meaningless to an user. However, they have the benefit of a somewhat constrained size, unlike words and phrases.)
I personally prefer interfaces that scroll, like web pages, to interfaces with a fixed or partially fixed frame, like mobile apps. A fixed frame works when you can fit it in full in your screen; this was easier on a low-resolution but large display than on a very high resolution 4-6 inch display.
Young readers probably skimmed over the bits about floaters in the eyes. Everyone older than 50 gets it.
Young readers probably skimmed over the bit about frequency definition, captions etc. Everyone older than 50 gets it.
I don't get the bit with walking sticks yet, but I am not there yet. But I realise that.
I was young and bulletproof once - even up until 5 years ago I didn't understand what this article was about. I gather by reading the comments here that most don't. The challenge is explaining ageing to anyone under the age of about 45, when it is entirely out of their scope of experience, in a demographic who think they know it all. Ageism is embedded in our society, whose best attempt at inclusion and diversity is based on colour of skin and gender. I don't think it will change, it has probably been the same for thousands of years.
I had to go around to a friend of my mothers the other day - in her 70's, her younger relatives had switched off captions on her Samsung TV. She had no idea how to turn them back on. It is hidden about four layers deep in the fu.king menus. Why isn't it a button an on/off button on the remote? Another button amongst the 20 already there? In the manual - It got a paragraph mention about 30 pages in, in a tiny font. So discriminatory. I am seriously thinking of making a career of this, while I still can!!!
There is also the 'no bullshit' attitude that starts to emerge when you turn 40. You want product to do a thing. Not to engage you in any way. You either already have a life or you know you will never have one.
Many older people have money and they are willing to spend it if does a thing and it's easy to get.
If Amazon would buy Paul Graham's old Viaweb code, it would need just little updating to become a tool that generates killer UI's for the aging population in the developing world. Plain html5 with commons sense and good defaults with tiniest amount of javascript is all you need for a well functioning web service. Incidentally Hacker News is not far from this ideal.
This is what good news site looks like: http://lite.cnn.com/en
Yup. Sure, I like to tinker with things sometimes.
But I don't, for example, particularly appreciate spending half a day yak shaving with a computer just to get it to the state where I can actually use it for the task I actually set out to do.
About a year ago, I decided I should have a working Windows computer for games and the occasional other Windowsy thing I want to do. My first thought was to upgrade one of my home-built systems. Instead I ended up just buying a big laptop on sale because I more or less to myself that I know how to build computers. But I don't especially want to in this case. I just want a relatively compact computer I can use for some specific tasks.
I've always wanted a consumer electronics brand that was known specifically for usability. For commodity tech, like TVs, radios, monitors, music, I don't want the most impressive specs -- I want a brand that means "we will be easier to use than the other brands".
Choosing between Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc etc.. it's all meaningless. Give me a BRAND that says "easy-to-use".
Typically, societies are gerontocracies; the aged run the show. Sometimes it's formalized, usually it's not. It's only in the modern Western time and place that we have begun to prioritize youth. Even in the USA, the country which is famed for idolizing youth, the old are in power and are the primary voters.
Jordan Peterson claimed in an interview with Joe Rogan, that his meat only diet got rid of his visual floaters, and that they are an autoimmune problem.
I question how much they are autoimmune, but I've never noticed anyone talking about getting rid of them, deliberately or as a side effect, before.
Any other anecdotes out there about this kind of thing?
To say nothing of older people I've seen on flights who struggle to turn on their entertainment consoles.
Turning on a device should not be a puzzle-solving exercise. As Alan Kay said, "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." Too often, the user interfaces make complex things doable, and simple things possible, with great effort.
(Also I don't know if this is a thing in design methodologies : I prefer if designers avoid having basic functionalities as a result of a sequence of steps, rather, I like to have them as separate top-level buttons)
It is if you care about ergonomics - the rule is, the more frequent an action, the less key/mouse/fingerpresses it should take to invoke.
It is not if you only care to make it look pretty, good for the demo or to encite first-time users to subscribe to your SaaS.
A lot of it seems to be designers signaling to other designers. Like Dribbble has expanded across the web and product landing pages are now the shots.
I think it's related to how chain stores & restaurants look so much more polished these days, and completely re-design their logo and colors (repainting whole buildings) every few years. They didn't used to do that, and everything generally looked a lot less "slick" than it does now. All I can figure is a couple of them started doing it to differentiate themselves from smaller chains and mom-n-pop stores (that couldn't afford that crap) and the rest started doing it so they didn't look left behind. Such a waste.
> Loud restaurants are torture. So, more and more, my wife and I select restaurants by their noise level rather than by their food quality. At home while watching TV, whether shows, streaming events, or movies, we always turn on the captions, which often block critical parts of the image. Even worse, when a film shows someone speaking in a foreign language, the film often translates the words, but so too does the closed captioning, and the two are placed on top of one another, making both attempts to help the viewer completely unhelpful.
I'm (only) in my 30's and every one of these applies to me and my friends, as well.
Netflix does captioning very well.
One difficult thing to grapple with here though is that my impression of the elderly is that the bulk of them are living on a tight budget to make sure that their retirement savings last them through their remaining years. Well designed, hip and beautiful products typically come at a hefty premium (think Apple tax). How many elderly people are willing to pay a premium for good, user friendly design?
Could it be that the reason we don't see better design for the elderly is because most of them are unwilling or unable to pay extra for it, unlike the young?
The difference is that college students expect to make more money in the future so they don’t put any thought into stretching their dollar. Retirees are the opposite. They may have bigger bank accounts, but for most of them, they know that’s all they’ll ever get.
They're wonderful people, but there was a lot of pressure to keep prices down because "I'm on a fixed income". That makes it harder to invest more time in design, even though you need to since they're your main market.
(I'm even aware of a couple of elderly 'customers' where "my son gets me all the software for free!", nudge wink torrents.)
Elderly users often require a lot more customer support and hand-holding than a customer in their 30s. Some really enjoy the customer support since for many of them it's one of their few social interactions of the day. Which is fine, but if the product also has to be cheap to meet a fixed income, it's hard to be profitable and have great design and excellent non-rushed non-offshored customer service.
Of course, not all customers are the same. I'm sure there were wealthy & savvy elderly customers too, but I didn't know how many because they never contacted customer support & so I never got to know them personally.
Old people dont aspire to be old. They are, for the most part, quite happy to buy products fronted by younger people who remind them of their younger selves. So the missing grey dollar goldrush this article bemones is largely already being served, and its worth considering that most ads must simultaneously reach multiple demographics, would you aspire to drink old lady coke?
Advertisers are not stupid.
The other alternative, of course, is to opt out of some of this technology. iPhones aren't great for the elderly? Well, dumbphones are making a small comeback and are much easier to use.
For the increasing number of people who have cataract surgery, the eye’s lenses have ben replaced with plastic, which usually have a fixed focus. (Artificial lenses that can be focused are under development.)
My dad recently had cataract surgery and I just assumed he was getting would be a deformable lens that would give him the ability to focus again. Does anyone know why it is so hard to develop such a lens ? As far as medical breakthroughs it seems like low hanging fruit and most people over the age of 45 could benefit from such a surgery since that is the age at which our lenses begin to harden and can no longer be shaped by our ciliary muscles.
Not in medicine or medical research, so great grains of salt required.
1) immune rejection
2) non-degradable
3) same modulus of elasticity as a biological lens (and maintains elasticity)
4) (relatively) cheap source materials
5) (relatively) cheap manufacture
6) survive all testing; up to FDA approval
Can anyone in medicine comment on this?
Compare that to a small cut to the side of the eye to extract the old lens and inject a new one that is held in place mechanically.
The problems I observed my elderly father having is:
1) The website times out way too soon. Before my father could type up three answers it timed out. Each time he has to start from scratch.
2) An answer to security a question, like "who was your first teacher" Can have many variations.
Did he type in first and last name? Was the first name before the last name or the last name before the first name? Did he capitalize the letters? Did he spell the name correctly, its been many years. Did he make any typos.
The worst I saw recently was a mandatory security question about "What was the first city you visited?" The answer was multiple choice with about 6 city names.
Myopia and hand aches give excellent perspective on the problems of accessibility in UI design. Alas, they also tend to limit my time with the machine and productivity in that time.
It's about the same how Reddit users' average age is purportedly twenty-something but the content and comments are dominated by teenagers. Teens just post way more.
Ultimately, accessibility for the elderly is a typical case where one has to invest additional effort by choice and principle. I.e. not gonna happen under just the market forces.
It's amazing how much you learn getting out and talking to customers. One of my favorite examples is for a company that sold plumbing supplies to contractors. The biggest feedback was that these guys spent most of the day in a truck and needed to be able to place orders on their phones and they begged the team to make sure that all the buttons (and links) were much bigger so that their fat fingers could click on them: "this was designed by a pianist".
There's so many examples of interactions that show that the designer didn't understand what the end user is really trying to do. My bank makes me enter a first and last name for transfer recipients, but only use the last name on the confirmation step, however the bulk of my transfers are to family members!
If you design for yourself at least you are using a real person. Personas are invariably about the same as designing for what's fun.
Congrats, your gray-on-white "decline" button that looks like a link is probably annoying for young and able-bodied users but it may be a serious obstacle for the others.
This drives me nuts. Especially when the closed captioning blocks the film's translation with something completely unhelpful like (speaking foreign language) Why even bother putting that in there?
If they’re documented at all. I only discovered the difference in iOS between a “long press” and “hard press” on the touchscreen by accident. The extra useability thrilled me, but I wish the feature were better documented.
Or use Safari reader mode. Or both.
Beyond uBlock Origin for the abusive parts, I've also recently started to use Stylus to fix bad design of sites I visit frequently. Few minutes with browser's Inspector and I can usually whip up a little bit of CSS that removes unnecessary whitespace, UI trinkets, and densifies the site by factor of 2 to 5.
AdGuard Pro is much better and supports standard lists like EasyList and Fanboy’s lists, along with region-specific lists and DNS-based blocking (so blocks ads/cancer in non-browser contexts too).
I think the reason for not using the full EasyList is that Safari limits the number of content blocker rules to 50k, less than can accommodate the full EasyList. I wonder how AGP gets around that.
In any case, I rarely see ads with 1Blocker. The one thing it doesn’t block reliably is ad blocker detection, but I’m not sure that’s even possible for a Safari content blocker to do.
Looking at the App Store, I see there are a lot of blockers now. How did you decide on AGP over the others?