Creating Online Environments That Work Well for Older Users | Hacker News Reader

Creating Online Environments That Work Well for Older Users

smashingmagazine.com

87 pointsimgabe54 comments

> I prefer text over video because I can absorb and retain information faster by reading than by watching YouTube

I'm in my mid-30's and generally agree. The number of five-minute Youtube tutorials for something I can read and grok--and I'm not a fast reader--in 30 seconds baffles me. And they rank higher than text in search results.

YouTube doesn’t represent video as a medium for communicating effectively very well.

Why? On problem with YouTube video is it’s less and less effective when there is incentiveization to increase the length of videos for ad slots.

Take a 2 minute video and turn it into 10.

How long do we wait for the 30 or 60 seconds of a YouTube video that we’re really after? Too often a few minutes.

Reminds me of watching Mythbusters.

Bingo! There is an ever-growing number of shows that manage to take a 60-second concept and turn it into a 10-minute bore through endless empty detours and pointless "interview" format interjections. "How The Universe Works" is a prime example of this tedious format. A little decoration is fine, but, in general, I want to watch stuff more like the BBC's excellent Jim Al-Khalili-hosted shows.

I really like LockPickingLawyer's videos [1]. It's no-frills, as all youtube videos should be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ

This is a great example of short content that draws you into wanting to watch longer content to get deeper insight.

I agree. We need to find a better way to monetize the text.

Yeah, my mental comment as I read was, "So you're saying I'm an old fogey at 36?" Mind you, my family and friends would probably point out that I was an old fogey at 26, and possibly at 16...

Poor contrast (gray on gray) is a big problem, as is tiny text. Not everyone has 20/20 vision -- many people, even with glasses or contacts, don't, because they have uncorrectable vision difficulties -- their doctors will not recommend surgery because the risk/reward isn't worth it, or simply because there is no cure (lots of eye conditions end up diagnosed as 'idiopathic', medical-speak for 'unknown').

Designers with 20/20 vision reading this -- please consider asking around to see if you can find a tester who doesn't have 20/20 vision. Alternatively just check for contrast and maybe view at 75% zoom and see if your design is still readable (Amazon is surprisingly usable at 50%).

"Part of the reason why Amazon.com has taken over the retail world is because over the last decade the user experience has remained consistent and predictable."

This. The number of times I've seen somebody think they're doing the right thing by "redesigning" a web interface is absurd. Don't do it.

Drudge Report

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe some people are too blinded by their politics to think objectively.

The fact is that, visually speaking, Drudge Report has been the Craigslist of news for almost a quarter of a century. A big reason for its success is that it is easy and familiar to use, which is particularly attractive to its target demographic.

I guess one advantage to being highly partisan is when you do something within your product that directly helps with its success, nobody will copy it.

Eh, there's https://lite.cnn.com/en/, but it's not well advertised. It's not quite the same deal, it's not a link aggregator and actually has less formatting/images/etc than Drudge, but I think it's getting a similar minimalist aesthetic.

Minimalistic, yes, but I don't think that's exactly what Drudge is doing. Drudge Report is formatted like a newspaper front page, which is an evolved format and one that his readers are already familiar with.

If people don't like the Drudge example, perhaps they might like Antiwar.com. It may look confusing at first, but it's the same format that they've used since their beginning and it works.

Whenever I get usability surveys for websites, unless there’s something really egregious, I tell them to not change a thing. Especially when it’s a bank or utility. I’m going there to check a balance or pay a bill. Do I really need a change up every 18 months to meet the latest UI paradigm? I’m all for the full employment of programmers, but find something else to do than float the ‘pay bill’ and ‘logout’ links to meet this week’s subjective ideal.

For me it’s “download the latest bill as a PDF” and “pay bill”. Invariably whenever there’s a redesign the first of those two functions gets buried further in the site.

Pocket Casts still gets me, and I encountered really weird behavior and have no idea how to fix it just a few days ago.

Not sure if I'm getting old, but if that's it I understand grumpy old people feeling righteous anger at changes.

I find Amazon.com to have turned into a mess. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to search only for items sold by Amazon.com. And on the product's page itself, it's confusing to figure out who is selling it. I'm pretty sure they keep moving it to confuse people.

And that mess of a model is being emulated by vendors like Walmart. One of the advantages of Walmart is that I can get in my car and go there today, but they've destroyed their own advantage by making it harder to see what your local store has in stock.

Yes, hence I prefer to use target.com and staples.com and bestbuy.com. Supposedly target.com is going that way too though, which would suck.

The good news is many manufacturers now allow you to purchase directly from their website.

An interesting contrast with Steve Yegge's claim [0] (shared here the other day [1]) that Bezos micromanages the homepage and won't allow change (obviously, both could be true).

[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986

As a certified "aged one" of seven decades I'm familiar with this. I think of it as simply another accessibility issue. I believe it is unreasonable to expect designers to adhere to any particular standard. They have stuff to sell and audiences to please and since the old often fall outside that demographic, they can be safely ignored. I think it is more important for the older user to have tools that can mitigate the situation as needed: the ability to easily adjust screen resolutions, increase contrast or switch to a plain text display without distractions. I would be happy with that...

My grandma owns a tax consulting business and began using computers in the age of Dos. Over the years I would end up with her old computers and that's essentially how I became familiar with them when I was young. About the time I graduated with my CS degree, I realized something.... My grandma isn't actually that capable with computers. Even though she's literally been using them longer than I have, she had only really been performing a few tasks beyond get work, and never really spent time using or learning the nuances of computers and operating systems. I think she never really caught on to the changes Windows and web browsers made over the years, and she just stuck to her work. Now, you might not tell her apart from someone who just started learning.

that feels, to me, like a real failure of our field. What other tool can you use every day for 30 years and still be a novice at?

Most of them. I use a toilet every day and have no idea how it works except for I push the button and my shit goes away.

To be fair, the toilet hasn't changed much in the last 30 years but computing has drastically changed.

Has it though? The development of smart phones is probably the biggest thing. Computer use is still mostly the same outside of hardware changes and the software industry.

Consumer computer use is pretty stagnant I'd say. Click the icon of the program you want on the desktop. Read/watch some things, click some things, scroll a bit.

Yes, it has. I've had many experiences that have required me to perform online sleuthing over the years just to keep my computer working properly. New programs ("apps") that seem to be change for change's sake, or worse, to try to make computers work like cell phones. My latest peeve: a Windows 10 update has caused my laptop to stop recognizing DVDs (though it plays CDs fine) and MS seems entirely disinterested in correcting the problem.

I think toilets have changed a lot. I have a Toto toilet that uses something like .7 gallons a flush and I am fairly sure is easily capable of flushing a cat or, at least, a large russet potato.

30 years ago a toilet needed 5 gallons and would clog if you used more than 12 inches of toilet paper.

> I have a Toto toilet that uses something like .7 gallons a flush and I am fairly sure is easily capable of flushing a cat

I think you owe it to this forum to provide a citation.

Fair call and I was wrong. I have two, one is the Toto Drake II and uses 1.28 gallons per flush. The other is an Aquia IV dual flush which uses either 0.8 gals or 1.0 gals per flush.

https://www.totousa.com/aquia-iv-1g-toilet-10-08-gpf

I was more interested in the cat claim.

That's just a guess. I don't have a cat to test it with and I like my russet potatoes too much to try and flush one.

While they may have changed in many ways - as far as the UX for the average user, it's been a lever to press to make it flush. Now I still see new low flow ones that have levers, and some new ones have 2 buttons. Of course there are those that auto-sense arrive/leave in some commercial establishments... But to the average user they have no changed that much I think - most still have a lever, if you can't find it and you are looking in that general area you will see the two buttons and likely press one to see if it flushes..

and press it again if it doesn't flush enough.. just like the old ones :)

Cars are the first thing that springs to mind, people use them for decades and can be very inept at operating them or understanding how they work.

Sounds like she has the focus on the task at hand and not the tool.

'Not good with computers' is not a function of age. There is also an assumption that people who grew up with smart phones are 'good with computers', but often it is pretty much the same thing: rote learning, fumbling around, getting friends to show them and sticking with the familiar. Tools, and maybe the applications are toys. Where as 'good with computers' tend to view the computer itself as the toy (and what are toys? Learning devices)

In a more strict sense being "good with computers" involves programming the machine, which requires a certain type of access to the machine and its resources. Provided, we're not dealing with bare metal, this means access and intimacy with a certain operating environment – which may be subject to change, as preferences for languages change, as do operating systems or the underlying hardware.

In a broader sense, being "good with computers" may mean a certain familiarity with a certain type of paradigm of interaction, as embodied in a certain suite of applications, which may and will be subject to change, as well.

So nobody is "good with computers" per se.

Well written with simple and clear explanations. I found this as a timely complementary/addon to another recent HN thread, "The modern web is becoming unusable" :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848468

Coincidentally, some of these principles are similar to what we have to apply for our B2B software, as a lot of the target audience are in a similar age group as author, continuing to work on older hardware. Having to continuously explain this to young developers entering the workforce is not easy, as the implications of various tech decisions and their impact on customers is not always obvious to them.

A useful addon for people with vision problems is a text/background contrast stretching algorithm. And/or an addon which can be adjusted for darkness and color prefs. One example of each for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

I think the article addressed this. Any time the reader has to reach for an add-on or click some other button to make your site readable, they're more likely to just go elsewhere. After all, quit a bit of the article talks about font sizes and colour contrasts -- both easily fixed by flipping to Reader Mode (I assume Chrome has something similar?) but really, how often do I do that? Hardly ever... the reading matter has to be reeeally compelling for me to bother with that.

Any friction at all is still a friction.

I hear ya. And I think that web accessibility has gotten better in the last year. But many sites are still squint-ville.

Yep, Reader is really great for seeing the main article on a page, no question. But sometimes there's a lot left aside. And you just need a little help seeing it.

Take a look at the 'Dark/Light' addon, I've used all day every day for over a year. Very little fiddling involved. You get to set the background, text, and link colors for everything. Finito, all problems solved (apart from using control-scroll to zoom font-size).

I usually hit the Reader View button within firefox if a page is unreadable. Returns a standard looking plain webpage, black text on white background at whatever font size I have it scaled up to.

Google's text-only cached results also help sometimes.

I usually hit the Reader View button even when it's already readable. I'm not the slightest bit interested in what some designer thinks the page should look like. Even if they come up with something good, it's still inconvenient because it's different.

Reader View still has gray text though, unless changed with userContent.css: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853840

> black text on white background

It seems to use the colors provided by the desktop environment, actually. I'm using MATE with its BlackMATE theme and reader view is white text on black bg for me (which is what I prefer). The browser's preferences itself are set to black-on-white (simply because almost all websites would break otherwise), hence why I'm assuming it must be using MATE's colors.

Maybe we could have 'creating video content that works well for older users' too... ?

I've got a 47" TV - typically sit around 7-8 feet away. Many - probably most - tv shows and movies that will add text (spy thriller movies, date/locations/years, etc) invariably use incredibly small fonts, and seem not to care about contrast.

Small white text on a picture of a cloudy sky is simply unreadable. It doesn't matter how close I sit - it's essentially white on white. #f6f6f6 on #fdfdfd. This is unreadable, but movie and tv producers seem perfectly OK with this trend.

These seem like good recommendations for midlife to older age group. I really wish we had more user research that backs up some of these recommendations. I’ve been doing a lot of research on text polarity readability (dark-on-light vs light-on-dark), and the color/text recommendations seem to follow the findings I’m seeing in that area. It’d be interesting to see a larger study with greater than 20-40 participants with detailed age group breakdowns.

It would also be good to bear in mind that First World demographics are already and increasingly skewed toward older age groups.

Something this article completely misses: double-clicking. I don't know how many bugs I've fixed over the years that were simply caused by double-clicking even though every single developer around me didn't believe that could be the cause.

Older people double click on things, even though my sample size is small, it's 100% of them. My Grandma, the owner of a startup I used to work at, my Grandma's friends, etc...

Old man Linux is the vibe I'm striving to live for; keep holding onto that 4GB laptop.

> Old man Linux

^ that would be a pretty decent HN username!

How about a readable notification bar for Androids? It would have helped me see that my charger cable was bad before I ventured outside in the cold with no way to recharge my dead phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com