I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone
forums.macrumors.com
forums.macrumors.com
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
(\.|^)apple\.com$
(\.|^)icloud\.com$
Also, set your Mac's `do not disturb` feature to turn on at 3:01AM, off at 3:00AM == no more notifications
You can then download OS updates directly from Apple's CDN via https://mrmacintosh.com/
I got a window machine and a month later “my computers config isn’t done” because I didn’t sign up for windows cloud and office 365 , oh do I want game pass?
I guess comercial OSs are just advertising platforms now which is kind of sad.
One day the eu will yell at them to do things normally and then Cook will go on stage to showcase what an awesome idea they had that nobody thought of before: “standards!”. Wait no, that’s usb c.
Side-rant over.
Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.
Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.
I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
And the whole window can not be resized horizontally. It's just jaw-droppingly bad.
though I have seen settings sections that are simply a "launch the actual config" button. but Wacom was doing that back in System Preferences days, so I'm not sure what to think.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.
Around 20 years ago (which, on reflection, is quite a long time) I, as a developer, moved to mac, as the way it all just worked without having to wade through the weeds was unbelievably refreshing. Couldn’t be more different to the experience you describe.
I bought my last Mac over a decade ago now - I’m now back on windows, as if I’m going to be nagged in an adware UI, I may as well use the one that gets in my way less.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
How the fuck did that get past QC? KDE on Linux has a reputation of being janky, but I have never had to put up with things being actually unusable by design.
My mum used her iphone for 4 years before she learned how to multitask with it, under my tuition, and she still struggles. She is good with computers.
It's beyond unintuitive. At least in the latest OS release, they've stopped hiding the searchbar in the ridiculous 'scroll past the top of the list' idiom.
The verge also has this wonderful paywall which completely breaks safari scroll such that you can't show the toolbar. The only way to 'go back' once you're hit with the paywall is to know about the hidden 'swipe from the far side' gesture in safari (cumbersome given the size of phones).
I sometimes wonder if people actually use the devices they make.
It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.
Federation's not a terrible idea for people who don't "get it," but many places are then starting to _hide_ the standard email-based login form... it's bonkers.
Google can go DIAF for their browser-based forced popover that so many sites have opted-in to (so they can sell more expensive ads, of course). [I use Vivaldi which is Chromium-based and AFAIK there's no way to shut off those prompts]
I thought the main things were making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace, that when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you, and maybe let apple track spammers, all of which would be fine with a persistent fake email...
I mean, facilitating multiple accounts, while it could be nice, seems way beyond the UX apple provides and isn't a typical paradigm for most software... this seems like an apple issue.
I suppose it'd be "simple" for the device to answer the call and then prompt for a password before ringing for the user, but then the random caller needs to know the password. But then again, it could be as simple as "This is Siri, please say the name of the person you're trying to reach.", and since spammers usually don't have a name associated with the number they just randomly dialled, they'll be stumped.
Trying to set a photo from photos as your wallpaper also creates a new lockscreen.
the only way to modify an existing, already set up lock screen is to long press, tap customize, and then tap the little photo square.
Did a UX designer even look at this? Because it sure doesn't seem like it.
It's a damn shame the hardware is so good for laptops, and that Qualcomm is taking their sweet time getting device trees for the Snapdragon X elite stuff into Linux, so the one laptop that's even remotely comparable to my Macbook (my Surface laptop 7) can't run Linux either. No other OEM seems to give a crap about putting out a decent laptop without compromises.
Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.
I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone. Say what you will about skeuomorphism, it was easy to understand, apps were visually unique from one another, and the friendly UI was a nice juxtaposition to the clean minimalist hardware.
I'm not sure that smartphones qualify as computers anymore, they feel more like pop-up picture books that only work when you now how to finesse them. And unfortunately that UX has been bleeding into computer OSes for a while now, most notably with the decimation of scrollbars.
The culprit? Apple. I missed a notification hidden below all the windows that iTerm was requesting access to my local network. So curl installed via Homebrew and activated using direnv was not working because it was not getting the required entitlement.
But curl in the `/usr/bin` directory was working just fine because it has the necessary entitlement from Apple. So "/usr/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was working just fine, while "/opt/homebrew/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was silently failing.
Fun. Fun. Fun.
Can you disable this bullshit? Nope. Permission grants need to be renewed every 30 days. And they pop up at the most inopportune moments.
Desktop Docker (eww, yuck) and it’s permissions, path hell and general bs.
Can <permissions dialogue> it <permissions dialogue> be <permissions dialogue> any <permissions dialogue> other <permissions dialogue> way? <permissions dialogue>
I want a headless mac mini running docker. Why is it so hard?
Instead, the whole company has become a dictator of its "users".
It’s so bad that at one point I considered having them try another OS, even though all they know is Windows.
Unfortunately everything is crap now. Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.
And don’t get me started on Linux distros, I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.
Can we just go back to Windows 98 or something?
Really good chance now a days that they won't ever run into issues, as long as the hardware is well supported. Slap something like Mint or Debian on there with XFCE and it'll happily run forever.
OK, I have SSH open on a non-standard port on my homemade NAS, and I notice the many many visitors from all over the world trying to bust through my SSH door... (I've implemented a web page to open the port when I enter a password there)
Navigating the google sales site? You don't need to do that, just go to a computer store and pick out a chromebook from there. Try to get one with a nice processor (ryzen or intel core), and a good amount of ram, and check the expiration date. Most major computer makers have some chromebooks, so you can stick with a brand you like.
Of course, Google is cancelling Chrome OS, so it might not be worth training your parents on it, because you'll need to do something else next time.
I remember switching to Mac years ago to avoid this type of user-hostile crap in Windows.
Yes, this is because in the beginning, like all systems, there was not much functionality.
The first iPhone lacked important functions.
But of course, this being Apple, users translate "this device is simple" into "this device is simple to use".
It just seems that Apple actually isn't all that good at it, despite that being their brand selling point. Once they started adding in more and more features due to pressure from Android, they lost the plot and ended up more complicated and disjointed. The cracks in Apple's ability to make software are showing.
They couldn’t go any higher. lol.
No thanks.
Billions in the bank and they’re cheaping out on talent.
El cheapos.
I thought indeed that it was all going to be much better, simpler, more elegant (phone was 2x the price so), but I ran into a lot of issues that I wrote down at the time (some things have been fixed by now):
* Tried installing Signal 4 times, it failed on the apple account generation and no further clues that it didn't or did install Signal (it didn't)
* Can't put icons on the bottom of screen, where your thumb is... need to fill other icons to get important stuff on the bottom. (Fixed!)
* App store does not start with search... So one feels a bit lost, where are the apps? (Fixed! Now a beautiful bubble at the bottom, does require good eye-sight to notice). Still think app store is not really about apps? IDK, it's screaming, there are anime cat girls everywhere; feels cheap.
* Absolutely maddening that it keeps correcting my .nl email adres to .nul (android leaves non txt field alone as far as I'm aware)
* No intro at all into UI (although nowadays I see some hints in "sets")
* Top suggestion in app store is never what you are looking for. Pretty strange. Can we change that? -> Later found out the top suggestion with dark blue around it is always sponsored... And since has NEVER been what I was looking for, never, I instinctively ignore it now like a vibrating "100.000th visitor" badge on a 90s webpage.
* Spouse got stuck searching for app in the Apple store instead of the App store..
* Many controls are at the top (this was pre-swipe, man am I happy with swipe gestures, really fixed iOS for me). Although again: How do you find out?
* My wife, after 3 years still can't remember how to close badly behaving apps to restart them.
* (Old remark) Video pauzes when taking a quick look at notification tray -> In the new bubbly iOS this is much worse even, I often quickly pulled down the notification tray for quick peaks, then let go. But in bubbly iOS there is 0 contrast until you let your finger go, and then the screen will sleep soon.
* You can't dismiss all notifications, since iOS 16 or so there is a dismiss button but it is still, to this day, unclear to me what subset of notifications it allows me to dismiss.
* Screen often goes to sleep as I'm curating notifications.
* Can't drag to folder onder lower bar/icon area (Fixed!)
* Pull down in center of screen gives Siri/search, not notifications, I'd swap that, now notifications requires hand stretching even on iPhone mini.
* I set Firefox as the standard browser yet both telegram and Signal (so far) always open Safari (Fixed I think)
* No notification grouping. (Fixed, but still not as nice as Android, where I spent quite some time in the notification center triaging)
* auto correct does not un-correct on backspace, autocorrect corrects the last word AFTER hitting send (still drives me mad, I just end every message with a space now to avoid looking dumb). Language switching does seem to go very well.
* To close a picture, swipe down, that really took a while. Although not all apps implement it.
* Red dots are not synced with open notifications, when I dismiss a notification I want the red dot gone.
* Hotspot keeps shutting down (it just remains on on Android, usually that is what you want)
* A couple of days in I had 652 mb of data on iCloud, no idea what it was. Then at some limit it starts to nag and it is not obvious how to make it stop nagging. I don't even want anything on iCloud, nobody asked me if I did.
* Alarms are very confusing. Your morning alarm clock is set in the health section (and under alarm) and is linked to your sleep schedule... OK, this changed many times a week, and irregularly... Spouse still has way too loud alarm sometimes because she refuses the "Health based morning alarm", yeah I know how that sounds to a non iOS user. Please also offer a decoupled version of the morning alarm. It's different from messaging alarms.
* Switching "Focus" by holding the lock screen is just very annoying. First you have to swipe down your notifications, then you have to hold the screen. But just long enough until you feel that it didn't work and start to squeeze more. My father asked me some weeks back: "What is this, why does this happen?? That thing you just did!!" And I explained him I was "switching focusses". He does not understand, he does not want it. He turns his phone off if he does not want to be disturbed (yeah and complains when we send messages in the night, because the night is for sleeping and thus only for emergencies... life was simpler back in the days).
* It took me more than a year to find out why my notes app keeps saying: "Restore writing" when walking through the DIY store with the notes app open. Drove me mad! Turns out, shaking is a trigger for un-doing things.. Or something... :s
* Replying to an email and adding a couple of consecutive pictures is a nightmare -> Switched to much better Proton mail now. Apple mail, idk, it works until it doesn't.
* One gets a "Screen use" report every week, when you tap it, it takes you to the current week, where you havent used you phone yet :s. Still don't understand how to see previous weeks.
There were also a lot of nice things though, ie widgets are much better, feel more connected. Swiping feels much more integrated and still works when apps crash etc. Overal I got used to things pretty quickly, but many, many things are very much not obvious (anymore) indeed.
Yeah it's a lot, I once thought about making a blog post about the switch but never did, just kept the notes and adding to it as I pulled my hair out over my iPhone.
> .nl to .nul
If you undo the correction on the prompt that comes up in the correction instead of fixing it with backspace or whatever it will stop doing that autocorrect
> No intro at all into UI
There is a very long series of tutorials for using the interface on first phone setup and then for each major update
> Video pauses while when looking at notifications
This depends on the behavior defined by the app. It did not happen when I just checked with YouTube (premium)
> pulldown on center is Siri
It has always been and still is notifications for me, maybe a setting?
> Safari instead of default browser
App defined. Some apps open a safari browser and some open my defined browser (Orion)
> Swipe up to close a picture
And some apps are double tap or even swipe up! What the heck?
> Alarms confusing
You can still set your daily/weekly/whatever alarms in the alarm section of the clock app. I believe this is the main way people set their alarms.
> switching focus by “holding”
Not sure what process you’re talking about but the control tray (swipe down from right side of screen) has a simple focus mode switcher with no acrobatics needed
Ultimately I think they both suck and we’ve all gotten used to the one evil we’ve chosen.
I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person.
The general use of the word dictator for someone in role like Jobs had or with his temperment has been around almost as long as the word dictator.
A cursory Google search for "steve jobs dictator" reveals references going back to 2007 at least. Several references even refer to him as Hitler.
Many people who worked with Steve, both those who liked him and those who hated him, described him as a dictator.
However, I can see why it might not be a concern for device manufacturers. We’ve had the iPhone for almost 20 years. The number of people setting up a phone from scratch who have never used a smartphone before must be minuscule at this point and will continue to dwindle. 80 year olds were still working when the iPhone was released. They will have experience using computers at the very least and more than likely have used smartphones for a long time.
Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.
It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.
Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.
no, because
>introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year
is antithetical to "doing it right". doing that is sufficient to prove you are not doing it right.
Are you talking about Apple? This sounds like the PC or Android world.
"I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone."
I don't think the author has actually tried "Assistive Access" mode: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/abou...
It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
I highly recommend it.
Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it.
My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
Control Center > Rotation Lock [1]. It's been a feature for years for pilots.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-sc...
> The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
Thank you Apple nanny state.
Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view.
But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
Issues:
1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings
2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end?
3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?)
4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists
I literally can't get this set up...
Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled!
Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier
You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.)
This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway
The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue)
Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example)
TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead
Other apps can offer a proper Assistive Access mode [0], but when most developers these days put writing a real app in the ‘too hard’ basket, getting them to actually use platform features feels like an impossibly long shot.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accessibility/assi...
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
Still, I'm in my early 40s and I find myself baffled when I help my mom with her iPhone. I've been an Android guy ever since that was an option.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
Just recently I wanted to change the default AI assistant from Gemini to Perplexity and after having found the option once, somehow, it took me ages to find it again.
You can still find some of the educational films: https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q?si=5fiNEiqccg41nxQb
Instead, ask them what they want to be able to do, and show just that. The temptation is to show too many things.
Also, you can still configure an iPhone with no passcode, which is honestly the way to go, probably.
Literally happened this month with iOS 26 on my family iPad. Suddenly it had a passcode and I knew exactly why.
I switched from Android to iOS and I must say: both UX are completely enshittified. For me (IT person) not a problem, but for elderly rare occasion users it is absolutely terrible.
On one hand you can now talk to ChatGPT in natural voice, but figuring out how to make a cell phone call on iOS on your own: impossible (spoiler: WhatsApp calls are also in the phone app‘s call list).
Sure, you could buy them a dumb phone, but for online banking etc you do need a smartphone. Good luck tackling the App Store if you only use it once a year….
Are you sure you’re allowed to do that? There’s a reason multiple user accounts aren’t supported (“buy one iPad per person please!)
(I have some very sad stories on this topic.)
On a PC, are you inclined to show your mom how the terminal works or to install Xcode? You don't because these components are not forced onto you, or may not even be installed. They are out of sight until you ask for them.
OTOH on the iPhone, instead of starting with barebones functionality and allowing you to enable the parts that are relevant to you, building your own UX, they try to make you fully buy into the Apple ecosystem. This is essentially the result of the "batteries included" design philosophy of the iPhone (which is good!) when combined with Apple aggressive marketing policies.
Which is better than iOS in every way, because there is just one way to go back and there being no indicator in the app how you should do it. Do I swipe or do I look for a back button?
Even if touch screens are not remembered as one of the worst inventions of the early 21st century, they are going to at least be remembered as enablers of terrible human-computer interaction patterns.
Android is every bit as bad as iOS. Windows is as bad as MacOS, and Linux is as bad as either of them.
And it’s not just older folks. I routinely run into problems explaining technology to relatively younger folks; even highly educated ones.
I’ll bet that the author would have been just as frustrated, teaching Android to a room full of doctors and lawyers.
My doctor just sold his practice to NYU Langone, a very good organization (and he got lots of money, I’m sure). They installed a really intense (and expensive) IT setup in his office. I’ve been watching him and his staff, struggling with it. It’s actually an excellent system, and I’m sure that many folks here, would be proud of it, but they still struggle. He has a full-time staff member, supplied by Langone, whose only job, is to come in and help staff use the IT services. She’s very busy (and patient).
I feel like Accessibility needs to include discoverability, affordance, and usability, as principal axes.
The terminology we use, the words we pick, in user interface and feedback are vital. The design of affordances, the placement of UI elements, etc.
Glossaries are really important, and I watch people’s eyes glaze over, when I start talking about them. You can have Design Language glossaries; not just text ones.
It’s a huge topic, and not a particularly popular one.
I feel that a good start, is highlighting examples of products that get it right, with discussion on how they do it. I get pretty tired of everyone complaining about the failures. That’s just discouraging, and tends to get people circling their wagons. I think good examples would be very helpful.
I’ll start. My wife likes OXO kitchen gadgets a lot. So do I. She tends to buy stuff that I’d never get, if I were making the decision, but I find really good, once I start using it.
I tried all the tricks gathered over 40 years of dealing with ever-evolving technology and then this WTF of not being able to switch on water.
It happens, not everyone catches on to new tech. And then I heard my whole team explain among them where a "working water cooler" is. Fortunately, one of them knew how to use the closest one. The whole herd (me included) trotted for a demonstration and now I know that I have to press 3 buttons, then when the incorrect button is lit up, I need to continuously press the small "start" triangle which you see in video programs. All the lights flicker, something something and, tadaaam, the water flows.
I have the same problem when I have to use a shower I do not know. This reminds me a time when I was trekking and saw my friends taking a shower under the faucet of the shower (yeah, the shower had a faucet) because they did not work out what needed to be pulled, turned, pushed, and whatnot.
if you don't modify your library, app, OS, etc for 2 years, it's perceived as abandoned or obsolete, meaning even if you're achieved perfection in your product in terms of ui, you can't stay there, you must move forward and break it (i'm not talking about bugs or security vulnerabilities here, only the functionality itself)
prominent example is w/ microsoft word, where they kept adding an absurd number of features simply bc they felt like they had to, since ppl were paying for it, and this will KEEP HAPPENING TO EVERYONE so long as the software keeps moving at breakneck speed and backwards compatibility and stability are thrown out of the window...
I think that Apple’s Snow Leopard MacOS release was almost identical, in surface features, to its predecessor, but is considered one of their best releases, ever, because it fixed so many bugs, and improved a lot of important functionality. Internally, it also established a technical fabric for the new architecture, but that wasn’t visible to users.
It should have been a form and about 3 buttons but instead it’s an increasingly complex UI with incoherent, overlapping, confusing features, many of them are footguns. The things you actually want the product to do are hard to find and are like 10 clicks away.
Definitely would recommend playing with one if you get the chance. Buying one… it depends on how much the device appeals to you, mine got active use for a couple months and then has fallen off
Would most people who struggle with modern UI/UX would customize the discovery in their own way i.e. should every UI be configurable in a way it aligns with each user's mental model? And how would a UX system *behave* to find the "best" model for the job?
Not sure if you are an iOS user, or not, but the Accessibility customization is batshit crazy. Lots of cool things to tweak, but there's way too many knobs and switches. Also, and this is an issue with settings/preferences in almost all apps, regardless of platform, the damn settings aren't where they are supposed to be. They get placed into screens that match the designer's structure, but not that match the user's mental model.
I'd like to see customization models that match user mental models, and maybe better support for adapting to the user.
"AI" may be helpful, here. I think previous "wizards" have not been up to the task.
If a user can't figure out how to do something, the user is not to blame. The designer is. With so many features in iOS now completely invisible to the naked eye, it's very clear who is responsible for this mess. And it ain't the users.
The original iPhone had ~30 features it had to make work in harmony with each other. The current version of iOS has thousands. Each additional feature is an increase in difficulty in making it feel harmonious, and it's beyond the remit of what a single designer with a single vision can handle. It's grown to a scope such that no single person can contain a mental map of every aspect of it at once.
It probably won an award.
The important thing is to keep it focused on what people might actually use and care about. For the ChatGPT class, he wasn’t talking about generating code, he talked about how he used ChatGPT to help him understand results from medical tests, which led to getting bypass surgery 6+ months sooner than if he had waited for the doctors to call him every time.
I’ve found most people want to know the bare minimum to get what they need done. People are busy and they aren’t looking to be technology experts. They just want to know how to do the basics they used to know how to do without feeling lost.
These days, for someone who had issues with the complexity. I’d turn on Assistive Access[0].
There is also the option to refer them to Apple. That’s what my dad would do during his class if someone needed more hands-on help than he could provide when teaching a whole room of people. Apple offers classes at their stores, and people can call support. So he made sure to cover that to shift some of that to the experts.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
I always refer to chat interfaces as a computer. A single episode of dialogue with a thing with no mind.
For the sake of our parents, we (as technology builders and buyers) need to be more comfortable saying the latest iPoop Galaxy S might be just not the right choice for a big segment of our society, and we need to make phones with buttons.
Mom uses a stylus with a conductive rubber tip to operate her Pixel. Which shouldn't be necessary.
With regard to learning to use a new release - since Apple (and no one else either it seems) ships a manual with their pocket computer these days, they need to have a group of people creating videos that explain how to use it.
Of course, if you can't get past the OOTB setup, that might of of minimal use...
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type
For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
This should be possible? Or at-least it was when I was still using an iPhone, which was less than a year ago.
1. Search settings for Apple Pay
2. Tap Apple Pay Defaults
3. Toggle off Double-Click Side Button
(Siri disable instructions in sibling)
This happens to me way more than I would like. For the life of me, I can't figure out the utility in being able to move my lock screen 1/2 way down the phone and have blank space on top. I don't know what this feature is or how I would activate it if I actually wanted to.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...
To an outsider, the iPhone UX is heavily dependent on non-discoverable gestures. Some of the gestures are obvious and shared with the design languages in other operating systems, but some aren't. Some of them "make sense" once you learn them, but others feel arbitrary and non-obvious.
If I was ever handed an iPhone and asked to contact someone specific in an emergency, I'd probably end up fumbling around for a dumb amount of time. I'm sure the necessary steps are easy once you know them, the issue is going in blind not knowing them.
Having worked a job getting seniors acquainted with using desktop computers as a teen, I don't imagine the same task would be easier today with iPhones. It feels like the UX assumes you're already fluent in their language.
True for a dumb phone also. I remember then because i'm old
Control Center is hard, Apple. (Not for my generation but millions of people)
I gave up and returned the phone.
I was desperately wishing some hipster had refurbished an old style rotary or physical push button phone with a Sim card, but not even that exists.
I mean, I get it. It's the perfect engagement metric-driven design. It's the perfect dark pattern. I'm sure you switch that on and whoa!!! Look at how many people are using Siri!!! They must loooooove Siri!!!
It's a thing on Android too. I switch it off. I know it exists and I know not to activate it, and I still switch it off.
Unfortunately, a lot of non-technical people, especially older people, are deathly afraid they are going to break something. They worry about this so much that they are not willing to just try things, and figure it out.
We had to get them comfortable with making mistakes, and that it was OK to make mistakes with these devices, because they are mostly locked down and you can't break them. Especially if you're 73 years old, trying to play bingo.
1. The setup process should have a heavily simplified mode right at the beginning. It may not be simple for Apple to decide what to exclude from the standard setup process, but there are several obviously time consuming, annoying and unnecessary steps in it. A lot of behaviors with side button double click, camera button swipe, etc., should be off by default.
2. There should be a very short test on finding out the accessibility needs of the user (to the extent possible, because some people may not know how to follow written or spoken instructions).
These are not just for the elderly, but also for many others who have accessibility needs, who lack knowledge about gadgets (or can’t be bothered keeping up with changes in interfaces and disappearing physical buttons), who just need something simple that serves a few actions (like phone calls, video calls, taking photos, viewing received photos and videos, etc.).
I dread the day my older mom updates her iOS and calls me for help.
The UI reaction feels more delayed now. If i'm in the middle of a call and want to go private, or some how got connected to the slow network, and i want to switch to the other one.
I feel like I used to be able to do it with 2 or 3 simple clicks. Now i cant remember if i need to click once, or click and hold, and by then the animation changed and now I tapped again and its doing something i did not expect.
For me personally, I used to be a wiz at navigating this phone on older OS versions - and now i feel like a klutz and it doesn't do the thing I expected anymore.
This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
Settings could be super simplified. People using, for e.g. mail and browser only, could ask for an integrated UI/UX experience for both. There could be a remote assistance escape hatch as a permanent UX feature for the early days of use for someone you trusted to help you. Power users can ask for more stuff and add more features.
Another thing would be for a AI to do just one thing. e.g. you can configure it at set up to just help one how to do X. This is really not easy. e.g. an AI would need access to your windowing system and peripherals and then infer from your prompt where you are stuck to help you.
So many wonderful things could be done if they invested more into user research and figured out how to help people. It would boost adoption — and more importantly brand love — up the wazoo.
All of the world population. Nobody can escape aging.
My mother in law is confused between contacts, contacts in messages, contacts in phone (we should have one place to do one thing: store names she wants to contact. She doesn't get that it's the same thing in each app).
She routinely long taps on things accidentally, turning on or off functions she doesn't understand. No easy way to figure out what she reconfigured from miles away.
Tap targets are all small, with non-scaling buttons even in Apple's app. Making everything large across every setting I can find either breaks apps or has inconsistent effects.
Having all settings in one Settings tool means having to leave an app to change how it works, which is counter-intuitive (to change the toast time, go to the fridge and move the butter around) to many folks.
I've stripped the device to just her favorite apps, but I can't limit access to settings, controls, or other aspects. I just want an extra step so she can pause and "cancel" things she doesn't understand. Apple gives no option: everyone is a user with benefits (no super users in iOS).
I tried the child protections, but she's not a child. She should be open to watch what she wants, chat with whom she wants (yes, there is risk there) and that's the opposite of of what child protections do.
Long time Apple fan, but the complexity and lack of controls is becoming really painful. For folks who need simplicity and consistency, Apple appears to have left that far behind.
My fear, of course, is that she is future me: my interactions will suffer with mixes of gestures and mental controls and smell-ux, and my kid won't be able to set the device to work with my needs.
I am confused too (o, Android), after discussing with developers and reading documentation. Some things simply do not work despite the producer telling you they do.
Contacts is one of the worst offenders.
Things like double click a mouse is difficult to perform two very fast clicks, without also moving the mouse,
Same with iPhone, swiping without deviating, pressing TINY buttons, and even what constitutes a tap are difficult for the elderly. Yes there’s zoom but that only makes it 10% better, as I watch them
I'm not sure where this can be pinpointed. Monoculture? Mimicry? FOMO?
Who do you recommend otherwise? Particularly for professional assistance when I am not around?
Every Best Buy and Apple Store is trained on it. Samsung would be the only other option.
- install one of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Signal
- install one of Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail
- protect/hide away settings and app store
- lock homescreen icons
It's a pretty foolproof setup. And I'm not sure why you would need a brand specialist to get help for such basic stuff. Walk with a Motorola into a Samsung store, I'm pretty sure they will be able to help you, especially if you are a polite senior.
Fall Detection requires a satellite connection, cellular connection,
or Wi-Fi Calling with an internet connection from your Apple Watch
or nearby iPhone. You can use cellular models of Apple Watch to make
an emergency call in many locations, provided that cellular service
is available.
One interaction that missed the cut was using the tablet's accelerometer to answer calls so she wouldn't have to interact with the screen at all. Simply tilting the tablet forward and back on it's stand would have answered the call. You just can't beat the customizability of Android (with Tasker) for things like this.
https://kavi.sblmnl.co.za/grandmother-communicator/ https://kavi.sblmnl.co.za/grandmother-communicator-part-2/
Ultimately, I don't think it's to her detriment. There would be some ease of mind if she had a cell phone and were comfortable using it (over a home phone) but tech is not for everyone.
I have helped many a tech challenged person (of all ages) learn to better use their devices. You need a lot of patience and to actively resist succumbing to the curse of knowledge.
The first and most common roadblock is that they often don’t know their passwords!
In my opinion, standardizing almost everything into uniform list-based UIs actually makes it harder for the brain to remember. Variation and distinct visual cues help us build stronger mental maps. But in the end, it's a matter of time and practice until things feel 'in the right place'.
Apple should definitely have a R&D team working on such approaches.
I'd love to switch off the App Library page, the Today View, Tab Groups in Safari. I frequently open these and it's always unintentional.
> Nokia "dumb" phone
I don't think this exists anymore. I got one for my dad because it has an emergency button on the side to call mom. But its really some android front-end with a bunch of modes, and not at all 'easy' if you weren't into this interface back in the day. He has lots of problems with it. Next plan is Apple's 'Assistive Access' on an old iPhone.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
Here's one, which is some sort of retro-revival. I've just chosen that because there is a Wikipedia page for it.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210_(2024)
There are quite a few other examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HMD_Global_products
I am really disputing the premise that this interface is really in any way easier or "dumber" than an iPhone. It is more primitive and maybe people learned it's ways a long time ago and don't want to learn anything new. But it has loads of modes and it's really easy to get stuck in some place where you can't do something basic. It is not at all a "dumbphone", it is a complete smartphone with a dumb interface.
(IMO it was a total mistake on my part, and the only thing good about it is the emergency button.)
An iPhone 1 wouldn’t have met their needs either. Old keypad Nokias had already been deemed unsuitable because they couldn’t use them safely.
From the post:
none of them could understand how to unlock the phone. Entering a passcode was a nightmare because they kept forgetting it, even though it was a birthday they knew, lol.
…
I left there achieving nothing because they couldn’t figure out their old Nokia phones. The unlock thing on the keypad was too difficult, and if I turned that off, they kept dialing 999 in their pockets for some reason. That’s why I was there: they were calling emergency services 100 times a day, lol.
If you aren't familiar with the concept of where files are found — e.g. where are downloaded files — it becomes infinitely more difficult to them to remember and add another UX/UI abstraction e.g. how to open a file using a suitable application. Lack of homogenity between OSes and Platforms makes it all the more harder.
This just keeps repeating for everything. Making attachments, knowing how to clear browser history, bookmarking, opening and searching through mail etc.
The comments following that one weren't very kind. And I agree with them. I'd hate for gestures to be the only option, and find the 3-button layout option to be the saving grace saving me from dreading to use my phone. I can't imagine that option disappearing, precisely because Grandmas and the like need that option to use their phones, but the fact that there are people out there who see that option as deprecated, and not even as an accessibility option at best, scares me. That thought is the start of process that eventually ends with some critical functionality being removed and never coming back, breaking a category of device for a large group of people, in a similar way to how the X11 to Wayland migration has broken several accessibility features on Linux.
I fear the day Facebook finally kills it and I have to navigate the nightmare that are tablets, their ever-changing UIs, and endless unprompted prompts.
Apple sold the abysmal usability under the disguise of high-class label and durability.
Example: They are scared to use their camera, as the camera app applied a myriad of it's own settings and effects that they don't have a clue how to take a simple stupid photo without any effects.
And the reason why this flood of complexity hits an unsuspecting user is, the businesses were under peer pressure to boast of more features and options while not recognizing the negative effect of the complexity on the usability.
This is one of the largest detriments for iPhones for me, personally.
On Android phones I can just connect via usb and drop ebooks, movies, audio, pictures whatever quickly with no fanfare on Linux/Windows/MacOS (I think? with some android file explorer thing)
It doesn't help that the user interface changes every year or two so every time there's an "upgrade" you get confused and need to re-learn how it should be used. Or that on every update there's a slew or dark patterns designed to cost you money or privacy, or both. (This applies to computer operating systems as well which further reinforces the fact that a phone is a computer and not a dedicated device.)
It's also unfortunate that you cannot ever decide to stop using a mobile phone, as many essential services like banking and government require you to have one. So you're stuck using one for the rest of your life wether you like it or not.
One of my elderly neighbors is happy with the generally-fine iOS defaults. Another elderly neighbor (I'm the "helpful computer guy" on our street, paid in appreciation, good karma, and baked goods) is a tech enthusiast, loves to play with his devices, and is no more intimidated by an iPhone than a Gen Z'er. My mom-in-law is 87, and we tried Guided Access with her but it was "too weird", so we use FaceTime's "remote control" feature if she needs help. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/request-give-remote-con...
I'm not blindly cheerleading Apple here, beyond just noting that they're the most accessible choice of mainstream smartphones if the Apple ecosystem is the best solution for that particular elderly person and their support network.
There are several very good non-Apple options for "semi-smart" phones like the Jitterbug Smart4, as well as good old-fashioned dumb-phones with big buttons, any of which may be a better choice than an iPhone for a particular senior. My understanding is that there are many Android launcher-replacement options designed for seniors and the visually impaired as well.
Infuriating.
He almost never uses search or menus for anything. Instead he has a bunch of home screens that he customized with quick links. Like he has one for each of his children with a one shortcut to text them, one to call, one to send a Facebook message, one link to their Facebook profile, and a note with special dates (birthdays, anniversaries) for each so he can remember to call them then. He's got another home page he has for stuff related to the Marines, websites and meme pages, etc.
He's very meticulous with getting everything exactly how he wants it, and is so proud to show it off. Sometimes he still needs help (last time I was there he asked me to help him set "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as his ring tone), but I'm honestly really impressed with how well he's adapted.
Meanwhile another older family member handed me their phone to fix, and it's completely unusable from malware that's highjacking everything they try to click, then they try to install something else to fix it themselves and somehow add even more malware. Took me like half an hour to track everything down and disable it so it was usable again, couldn't convince him to factory reset it. We had a nice long chat about installing things after that. I can't imagine he used anything other than the playstore, but man, it was wild.
I would also add that overly designing things usually makes interfaces worse over time. Designers assume some sort of prerequisite knowledge from a user which is not always the case.
On the other hand, having observed kids explore the interface I'm always amazed at how quickly they intuit everything.
I believe (for some reason) that to be true for anything a kid has an interest in. As a kid we figured out how to navigate games in black and white, Japanese and without any guide/tutorial/internet, just because we wanted to play Captain Tsubasa on our PSX.
Maybe the game was nicely and intuitively designed or maybe we just put the effort and time to figure stuff out.
Conversely, you get people (regardless of the age) unable to figure out the simplest systems (from a 2 buttons espresso maker to kettles and toasters) just because they can't contemplate having to sit down more than 5s to understand things out.
First: Giving a senior with aptitude or dexterity hindrances is already a mistake. Even if they are set up they're going to be having trouble with much harder to use apps such as banking, ticketing and government apps which seemingly delight themselves in publishing rubbish.
Second: iPhones have assistive access modes which preserve core phone functions while addressing accessibility impairment: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/
Third: The apple stores are help centres. Not only do they provide free guided setup (and help with forgotten passwords), but they also provide free training on how to use different functions of the phone, both in person or online.
Fourth: At any age we already know that some people use and understand technology better than others. (It's interesting to watch different people set up touch-id, some will resist reading any instructions provided on the screen over their own intuition for how the set up should work.) Grouping a room of seniors together to set up a phone is like getting kids from school years 1 through 10 together and expecting them all to perform equally.
Finally: Like giving a car to a teenager, one must take some responsibility in dumping such a product on a person who might not be able to handle it. Seniors are still autonomous and will look for help if you're not providing it - scammers enjoy "helping" seniors part with their money this way.
This is also an issue with Android. When I changed phones a month ago, I ran into trouble with my Google account. The only internet connection I had was my cellular data plan and during the mandatory initial set-up I could not enable hotspot on the new phone to do online 2FA on the old device.
Then why buy an iPhone? There are phones designed for seniors that do just that. You don't need to pay 10-30x more for functionality you don't need and can't understand. Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
The thing is that even the elderly want to do more than just that. Some want to be on Facebook. Some want to do their banking, especially if their PC is 17 years old and a smartphone makes for a cheaper purchase than a new PC.
A Doro or equivalent is if you literally only call (and maybe text), but even the elderly generally want to (or are functionally forced/compelled to) do more on their phones.
Have any unknown/invalid numbers go through to a default primary point of contact.
You need to be actively avoiding technology for the last 50 years to not be able to use a smartphone or PC today
An evening of tutoring won't undo that mindset
What it does is restrict the phone to the home screen, you can have a maximum of 8 apps (which are all shown on the home screen) and barely anything else. He does have notification but it's only for these 8 apps.
And somehow he managed to get it working, he only make phone call, send messages and take photo. That's all.
Before I had bought him one of these senior flipflop phone. The thing was expensive, horrible and the battery was absolute crap. It died in 2 years.
My Sumsung xcover pro on the other hand, battery last 2 weeks and he is running it since 5 years without complaints.
Things many of us take for granted need to be learned if you've never experienced it.
1) You actually care to learn their ecosystem in the first place.
2) You don't have to learn tens or hundreds of other ecosystems.
No thank you. Why should my phone assume that because I'm nearly 70 that I'm unable to think. In fact why should my phone know how old I am in the first place, or anything about me at all?
Much of the UI on modern electronic items is just total crap regardless of how old the user is. And the few things that are currently reasonable soon get changed for no good reason. One example is Google's Android Photos app. Extracting a fram from a video use to be a single tap, last week the app was 'upgraded' and now it takes three taps.
Just the phone app itself is a NIGHTMARE. Why would I say such a thing? Because touching anything will dial.
Because of this, the person was super anxious every time they used the phone.
You can touch the spam caller in the call log and it will CALL back.
I've done this myself, accidentally calling back spammers, or "butt dialing" friends and family accidentally at ridiculous times.
This is really easy to fix:
- have a setting (turned on by default) to confirm before dialing. (a butt dial should never happen)
- it might also be nice to add "call <person> (local time 4:37 am)"
- Well-run companies prioritize against a bell curve of core customers vs long tail customers
- Today, many of us are inside that curve. Products are made intuitive to us
- But many people (elderly) are not in the middle of that bell curve
And the kicker:
- One day, all of us will move out of that bell curve. Therefore, many products will suddenly become maddeningly frustrating to understand, at once
What's the solution? There's definitely a market opportunity for the long tail customers. But, it's tough to build a smartphone for a (relatively) smaller market. Maybe that's a startup opportunity
The three main principles of UI/UX design, particularly for seniors, but honestly, for everyone who doesn't have "learn new software" as a hobby.
All this has been sacrificed at the altar of privacy and security. How I wished I could have similar remote control over her Android phone. That would have saved sooo much trouble. But it was impossible.
A bit of work (and it's not free) to set up initially, but you could use an MDM for this. Most allow remote access/ screen control over Android devices, with the bonus that you also can remotely install & uninstall apps for her, control settings, etc.
TBH I think there's a market opportunity for a consumer-oriented MDM for families. There's a lot of features and control that's only possible for businesses with these devices, and I'm not sure why no one is making any kind of centralized management but for consumers.
But an article about some very elderly people who cannot remember their own birthday has triggered the exact same Apple-UX-is-in-decline rants that a post about Liquid Glass or literally any other HN post about Apple does. I agree with some of the criticism but it’s not really engaging the point.
My sister recently asked a group of us coders how to help the blind folks she works with complete a Gov.UK One Login signup that requires a passport and matching selfie. I consider myself relatively conversant with accessibility issues but none of us could find a sure thing workaround.
Alternatively, I think OP actually should look into the accessibility mode (“Assistive Access”) because it doesn’t take “hours” to configure. It basically turns the iPhone into a wildly easy dumb phone-like experience.
If you don't care about the phone, like many seniors, and just want a tiny slice of the functionality it can bring you, then modern smart phones are insane difficult to use.
When people ask if I can help with their phone, and they aren't my parents, then the answer is always "No". I don't understand smart phone and I don't care to learn. They are forced upon me by others, they are hard to operate, they hurt my eyes and makes me feel sick if I have to look at the screen for more than a few minutes.
I would go further and make they case the don't need all the smart features either and all they need is to make calls and that an iPhone, or any touch phone, isn't the right tool for the job. One might argue "well I want to face time and send them pictures" or whatever. Print them favorite pictures. A missing product is a video calling devices, similar to a dumb phone, that all it does is take and receive video calls. But the issue you'll run into is Apple's closed protocols or having to support a slew of other applications, like Signal or WhatsApp.
Having elderly relatives in other countries, I've resorted to making a touchless video phone with a raspberry pi, a big screen, speakers, a mic and a camera. I made a similar one for all relatives that want to talk as well. The "dialer" is just buttons that connect to other relatives directly. The software on them connects through a server I set up. I spent near 1 grand, or a price of a modern iphone, and managed to get 4 households connected.
We've inherited dumb a tradition of dumb procedural UIs which are effectively manual scripts that have to be repeated for each action.
There's been next to no useful progress on automating this. Siri looked like it was going to do it, but then it died on the vine. There's a very basic "Call XYZ" feature but the entire OS should have that level of accessibility, from Settings upwards.
Apple hasn't had a User Champion for well over a decade now, and it shows. There's the occasional Nice Feature™ - "Hey we need a nice feature for the presentation this year" - but there's no longer a Nice OS, and no one at Apple seems to have any interest in creating one.
Without Steve Jobs, everyone work with their own incentives, if shipping features is how you get promotion and raise. That is what we end up with.
I know this is controversial take on HN. 10 years spend on Swift and SwiftUI. It would have been better if we continue some small and iterative improvement with both C23 and Objective C.
Every year we see Apple SoC improvements, but my iOS or macOS is still not instantaneous. Safari 18 got better, and now 26 as well. But comparatively speaking it is still behind Chrome and Firefox in terms of responsiveness, and resource usage.
In terms of Design, the Home Screen is still a mess.
Compare to Old Apple, new Apple's rate of improvement and productivity has dropped significantly , with double or triple the resource but half of the execution in terms of Software. ( Hardware they are doing fine if not exceptional )
But if Apple software is really this bad, it just shows Microsoft and Google have been absolutely appalling in the past 10-20 years.
My mom wanted conservative social media. I just had to install it, and off she went.
She barely answers phone calls correctly. She can't pull up her contacts or voicemail. Google maps is something that somebody else needs to do. The refusal to learn is solid and hard.
What to do? Parents.
And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
I’m not sure as developers how you get round that.
But, but, but I really cannot get along with mobile phones! Whenever I pick one up I swipe or press the wrong thing. Just answering a call usually goes horribly wrong! And I have literal nightmares about it. So I am pretty much stuck with my VOIP landline, but am worrying things like my bank will stop supporting the tech.
Luckily, I guess I've done my three-score-years-and-ten, so I don't probably need to retrain. But I can completely understand non-techie oldies having problems.
Color-blindness filters are good or a monochrome monitor.
Some dark sunglasses and vaseline get the low vision point across too.
Rubber gloves for touch issues.
Otherwise, if they want to use email, whatsapp, etc., they also want passwords and accounts, hence security measures must be there. Someone has to help them.
And to whomever thought it was good idea to get camera access by swiping the lock screen: Did you ever meet a three year old? Why can't I turn it off?
"Why can't I delete those photos in icloud from here"
"Why does the thing I have to select move around?"
"What are all these ghost windows in safari and email and how do I get rid of them?"
"How do I yell at the clouds when this does not work?"
"How do I tell which bits are decoration and which bits are active?"
"What do you mean I can't take over my dead husbands account or move data from his account to my account"
Sad.
My dad has used an iPhone and an iPad for years and occasionally uses a Mac at home. He's not terribly old and is fairly competent with tech. One day he randomly said to me, "I'm afraid about when I'm older. I won't be able to understand how to use my devices because they've become so complicated and keep changing every year."
And I realized it's so true. Removing the home button on the iPhone and iPad was a massive mistake. It's the one interaction my 85 year-old grandma who doesn't understand computers could interact with. She couldn't even change the volume, but she knew that one button on her iPad exited things.
When I set up a new Mac, I wanted to display the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar for quick pairing because it wasn't there by default. When I searched online for how to add it, I got four different results for the past few years of MacOS updates that kept changing where the setting was. When I updated my Mac the other day, the Bluetooth icon was gone again! Once again, I had to search for how to add it to the menu bar because that setting is not located within the Bluetooth settings page. When I went to see how I could display if I was using Ethernet in my menu bar, I discovered that I needed a third-party app and had to spend time researching which one to download.
Meanwhile I get all of those features on KDE out of the box, and any more niche changes I want to make are much easier to discover because the settings and UI have looked the same for years. KDE is so simple. I'm currently using arch Linux, which is wonderful for me but will certainly be more complicated for the average user. That's where I'm very excited for KDE Linux[0]. Switching to KDE has been a revolution. I know more about computers than most people I know. And yet I feel like I possess significantly less domain-specific knowledge than my mom who is a MacOS power user or my dad who uses Windows at work. My mom's knowledge of macOS is impressive, yet I don't need half of that expertise to use KDE. It's the same feeling I had when I switched away from accounting where people were writing insane formulas, using VBA macros, and Alteryx to software engineering where I learned python and could write twenty lines of code to accomplish the same task. However, KDE is even easier to pick up than a programming language!
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about phones or tablets or what to tell my dad. He's starting to think he should go to the sessions at the Apple Store every time a major update releases annually, which significantly changes his daily-use devices. The regular crowd at those events is normally the elderly who grew up without computers. My dad doesn't quite fit in. But Apple has built devices that require you to have grown with every iteration and built up a deep level of context. Every time he upgrades his iPhone after five or six years, the new phone is unrecognizable to him.
Apple famously had a mouse with one button. Begrudgingly, they accepted the right click despite it being a less than intuitive interface. They've taken that design pattern to the extreme, and it has infested their approach to everything. The designers are too much of Apple experts to understand how far they've gone with the context requirement for successfully navigating their devices.
I only "upgrade" phones every 4 years or so, typically to a new old-stock model off eBay and I've been floored by how new phones don't include chargers anymore.
How is this considered acceptable?
"Yes, yes, darling, I see all these cryptic hieroglyphs [icons] – but I don’t know what they mean. Am I supposed to? Where can I look them up?"
That was a long day.
Here's how you should frame it: The only definition of "simple" that matters is "What I'm Used To". Currently, and again, I'm going to be crass here so prepare your sensibilities: we have a dying population of boomers who are not used to any kind of technology; but aging into their place is a population of substantially more tech-literate Gen X and younger individuals who won't need a different experience beyond, again, normal degradation of motor, visual, and hearing function.
My mom (~70s) refuses to get an iPhone. Why? Because she's always had a Galaxy S9. I've tried to buy her an S24, to at least get a newer phone, but its so different that she won't go for it. So, we've replaced this old S9 like 3 times now lol. My dad (~70s) switched to an iPhone, and we've told her, at least if you switch to the iPhone you'll be on the same device and be able to solve problems for each other a bit more easily; no dice.
The nokia anecdote in the post is awesome because it illustrates this beautifully: There is nothing Apple could do which could help. Oftentimes it isn't even about the phone being simpler; its just an inability or unwillingness to learn anything new. What we do, as younger people helping them where they're at, is probably the only thing that can really make a difference.
But Apple is the worst because of its Apple ID requirement. I tried to resurrect an old iPhone of mine only to get stuck in a week-long perpetual ID recovery loop with Apple. Enter the new password wrong too many times, and you have to wait another week to try again. Want to create a new Apple ID? Nope. No duplicate IDs attached to the same phone number. I finally just recycled the phone. I'm old. I don't have time to waste on an iPhone.
It was still possible to teach her Whatsapp, SMS and Gmail on an Android smartphone when she was around 80, but that was the window of opportunity closing; by a couple of years later, while she could still use those skills (and still had the finger dexterity and vision to do it) nothing new would go in. This was an issue when her hands got less steady and she sometimes would tap or click the wrong thing and then get confused. The concept that a message, ever so slightly clumsily tapped so the tap was seen as a right swipe and therefore "archive" was getting difficult.
So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.
And why not just set up your elders with tech that they are familiar with? You can take an old landline phone - even a rotary dial one! - and plug it into a VOIP adapter and register that with, say, voip.ms, and provide the old familiar calling experience. Didn't work for my mom, because long before becoming uncomfortable with technology, she was already deaf enough to not be able to hold phone conversations - so email was crucial to her.
As for iphones and confusion. As they got more and more locked down, they didn't just get locked down against purse snatchers and such. I've seen several otherwise still fine iphones become ewaste because the giver couldn't figure out how to unlink them from "Find my phone" or activation lock or whatever it's called. These are people who can't fathom the difference between their Google account password and their Apple password. Not old people. Just people who can't give a crap about any of that, they just have a phone that someone helped them set up, and it works and that's that. That was one of Steve Jobs's talents - to see technology as a neurotypical non-geek sees it and make it work for them.
We've got to keep churning UX constantly, for no reason whatsoever. The elderly be damned, usability be damned! What matters is that UI conventions always change and often get worse, and most importantly that this happens for no reason whatsoever.
I did a similar thing with my dad when he was going through parkinsons.
When I got him a book for seniors it turned out to be really thick, and justifiably so.
Egregious bits of the interface include the parts you can drag from the bottom and the top.
As well as things at the ends of the springboard.
There is so much in there its way too much to explain.
That's before you get to stuff like the difference between ordinary calls and say WhatsApp.
I think that if it were simpler, I'd be less inclined to do more with it than it is actually useful for.
In particular.
Selecting anything is a struggle. No exceptions. And selecting more than one screenful is a horror.
Scrolling often clicks on something I didn't want to click. And just try grabbing that invisible scroll bar.
Any auto correct or suggest is ludicrous. I had to kill them all.
Swipe text refuses to type "and". I get Anna's or Ava ( that was a live demo) regularly.
Searching for an image is good for laughs, except for ocr'ed text.
Paste? HOLEY MOLEY. Any "action after a delay" infuriates me, especially when it's hit-or-miss. Give me a paste button!
These are "99%" things, not outlying operations.
Disclaimer: the ipad with keyboard case, trackpad, pencil, ARROW KEYS!!!, and BT mouse is better. Almost a laptop, but right/control click is NOT macos like.
Okay, enough rant. It's basically the clumsiness, compared to the precision of a desktop, that gets me.
Advantage? I can use it on the easy chair in the living room.
No $1800 computer chair. The desktop is harder on my anatomy.
Just to say that some "features" stink regardless of user age, though no doubt harder in seniors. I figure out one of the 140,000 obscure options/tricks via internet search, something that decades of experience helps me do, but especially in recent years, is next to useless for normal people.
And! When switching apps, more often than not, safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
I lucked out this time.
One feature I like about Chrome is somehow it saves it if you go back, so if I've got a long ass comment I've typed out, and then I get distracted, I'll go back to the tab, the text I wrote won't be there, but when I go back, it reappears.
Maybe the solution is more education programs that help people catch-up. And teaching kids that the most important skill is to constantly experiment with what's new
Apparently somehow needed to have an "Apple account." Don't want one -- don't want to be subservient, subordinate to, dependent on Apple or hurt my privacy -- but relented and applied -- refused!!!!!
The phone rang, apparently with someone from Apple Help who somehow noticed that my frustration (wasting time) was about to explode with some gigatons of TNT, enough to level everything from me to CA on to Hawaii. Soooo, apparently Apple HQ is somehow always online -- outrageous privacy threat. Since I was trying to make the phone work for even the simplest things, I could not receive the call.
Heck, could not even get an Apple account.
Super, semi-quasi, pseudo bright: The phone isn't working so to help call the phone that isn't working.
Apple, to communicate with a new user, use some REAL computing, including email. Understand???
New user? That iPhone is my first cell phone, first Apple product, and hope my last.
Using some computing that has a real keyboard, 30" screen, an 8 core AMD processor, and Windows and actually works, eventually got to Apple online help. Was advised to press the "Down Volume" button. I asked which one of the five was that button, and the help staff didn't know. Soooo, not even the Apple help operation knows what the buttons do. Disney with Donald Duck could make total riot out of this disaster!
I declared the iPhone 16 Plus a disaster, expensive, useless, worthless, at best a puzzle box, and will return it to Xfinity.
Actually, of course, the iPhone is a grand triumph of electronic engineering, optics, software, etc. -- still for new users is useless and worthless as a phone, i.e., won't make or receive calls, just won't; several hours a day of absurd mud wrestling in the dark for several days yielded no utility at all.
Useless? First big problem: Apple, apparently with rock solid, ironclad determination, deliberately, totally refuses to DOCUMENT, say, with an easy to find, COMPETENTLY, BEAUTIFULLY, EFFECTIVELY written PDF of D.O.C.U.M.E.N.T.A.T.I.O.N. Go bankrupt, maybe. Write documentation for new users, NEVER. Won't do it.
Me? Can I read tricky material from good documentation? Hold a Ph.D. in applied math with plenty of pure math where learned lots of tricky stuff, but from well-written books.
Apple, shut up, sit down, and listen up -- until you DOCUMENT, for new users your expensive phones are worse than worthless junk. Sure, maybe high school girls form little groups and share some of the basics they discovered somehow, but I'm out of high school.
One word Apple -- DOCUMENT.
And the general iPhone documentation: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios
Sometimes, I wish this documentation was a bit more technical, but it’s not bad at all.
The film on the front of a new iPhone, that you remove to reveal the screen during unboxing, provides pictorial icons of what each button on the phone does. For volume down, you can see a minus in a circle. It’s the bottommost button on the left.
I’m not sure why you had so much trouble creating an Apple ID, but you can still skip that when it prompts you to do so. I believe it’s under “Forgot password or don’t have an account”.
Literally hundreds of millions of people have set up an Iphone, it's trivial if your aren't cognitively impaired and/or very elderly.
I don't understand how you could have trouble finding the volume down button.
It's quite obviously placed, and is one google search away if not...
Time spent learning, training and relearning your cellphone is time forever lost. I chose a different path and refused a cellphone for years. A year ago I got one. I use it for "away" situations only (when I'm out of pocket). Otherwise it sits in my office, just like my old AT&T phone did. If someone needs to get me, there's always e-mail.