These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily
the obvious fields in the list:
- education
- healthcare
- justice
someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically making people well informed, and communicating issues/info smoothly (instead of waiting days to get a fake answer by someone shady)
These groups of people aren’t served because there is not much money in it :(
The reason I put elders aside is that their motivations and emotions are very different from younger people. There are lot of fear, loneliness driving their need for help, and often they don't really want to own the knowledge, it's more a little bit of emotional support; which is cool, but not as motivating as, say, a younger handicapped person, who has more skin in the game.
The other week I witnessed first hand how multiple 50-something folks who own smartphones struggled with something as easy as filling a form on a website for making an appointment (in this case for getting a passport) and confirming the appointment by clicking an email.
Or think about the thousands of vulnerable/old people who will die of COVID-19 because they failed to schedule their vaccinations even though they could otherwise access it. A friend who works in Berlin on radiotherapy for cancer patients said lots of them aren't vaccinated because they just can't sign up for it and their doctor doesn't do it for them.
Anything that requires using technology, even as simple as using a browser and getting a confirmation email should be probably be also made available by more familiar/accessible tools such as SMS/whatsapp/facebook or a call center.
non tech saavy people rely on rote learning at surface layers, and every year comes a new way, new look, new lingo .. they feel it's yet another big knowledge gap to learn when in fact there's almost nothing new under the sun (algorithms are as old as civilisation, logic doesn't change much)