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Comment by bananaowl | Hacker News Reader

I witnessed my great aunt of 85 trying to watch TV. It was sad and painful. How ux is forgetting this entire generation is just terrible.

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When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.

The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.

I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.

I think it's not that they lose their mental faculties... it's that they lived most of their lives in a world without computers (at least home computers - which only became a common occurrence in the 90's, when today's older people were already in their 50's. So they just never learned to use computers and smart phones and are completely unused to their modern UIs. Even I find it hard to use many apps on my phone! Like, how am I supposed to know that wiping carefully up and to the left is the only way to do something!!!??? So, older people may try a few things, and if it's too frustrating they just find something else to do and give up. At least that's my experience with my mom and auntie. Both of them managed only to learn how to open WhatsApp and call family, but it's always an agony when they accidentally touch something and the video disappears, or pauses, or flips so they can see only themselves or some other nonsense. And that's all they use their "smart" phones for! They just wanted an old fashion phone with a big dial buttons, plus a screen to see the person on the other side.

On that note, compare early iOS and current iOS and the difference is night and day when it comes to even knowing what on the screen is actually a UI element. I'm pretty sure the only reason I even know how to operate my phone is that I've lived through the transitions that took away more and more and more of the actual visible UI from it.

Yes, modern UIs are baffling. You're meant to know that groping around the screen and swiping at things does magical things, or to swipe from the edges of things for other actions. Combined with the industry's perpetual desire to change what these gestures do every couple of years, along with the constantly changing UI elements (buttons don't look like buttons, then they do, then they look like links, then they look like buttons for a bit, repeat), it is little wonder how older people struggle with new devices and software releases.

Back with Windows 3.11, it came with a paper thick manual telling you how to use the OS. You could read it, and understand it, and you only had to learn how to use the mouse (the difference between right-click and left-click, and how to double-click fast enough), and also knew that scrollbars looked like scrollbars at all times, buttons behaved a certain way at all times, and UI elements were visible and behaved the same at all times.

I think we've lost that with modern UIs and it's a shame.

I do wonder how much of that is just convenience, a lot of people just don't want to bother, even if they would figure it out if they tried - they just don't. Your grandmother probably could've figured it out, but tapes were just much more convenient even if you had to rewind them (Obviously there's a learning curve, though)

Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple.

One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.

I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.

I'm 40 and sometimes I feel the same. Should I be worried...

Noopept

They don't want to bother because of the terrible UX on these devices. It's absolute lack of empathy for how people use their products.

I'm sure you didn't intend to be arrogant and dismissive of my efforts to try to keep her current as time went on.

To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.

Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?

Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.

I remember having trouble with mine, often mixing up the various hours (clock time, start time, end time, recording duration). Yes it was not rocket science, but it was used not enough to remember how to do it, and the manual was never ad hand when needed.

Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.

It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.

This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization.

Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.

I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.

It tends to happen in the area in general where I live. My house, neighbour's house, a house a mile away, all have the same trouble. I live within about six hundred yards of a volunteer fire department and about seven hundred yards from an elementary school, and even they've complained about how often the power goes out. The worst part is it's not like it's off for a few minutes and then it's back on. It's a momentary tenths of a second thing, like someone flicking a light switch down and up once to get people's attention.

Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.

But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ

I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE

The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.

The last short lived generation of VCR we owned had an on screen menu/UI driven by the remote control for setting time and programming a scheduled recording rather than arcane and tedious sequences of button presses.

I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.

Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)

I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10 minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set up often you'd always have to go back and read the instructions again the next time.

I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).

who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.

My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)

In theory, HDMI CEC should solve a lot of those problems. Unfortunately it only introduced another buggy layer.

But that was the niche, "elite" experience. Today, a "smart TV" is the norm.

This, 100%.

I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).

Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.

Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen broadcast stations you could choose from.

This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF.

The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.

> new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition,

Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture.

With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.

I still watch OTA DTV. Tuning is instant. Maybe it's slower if you are on cable and there's a few round-trip handshakes to authenticate your subscriber account.

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of round-tripping going on with the streaming services I use through my dongle. They're always slow to both start the app and to start any actual streaming.

That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.

With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.

UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.

In the long run shareholders care about customers though, not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market has always been about something other than fundamentals, but in the long run shareholders who care about customers tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.

When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.

It is odd because those symbols have been used for decades even on tape players.

I found it amusing the other year when a youngster knew what the save button was, and recognised it, but didn't know what it was - a floppy disk (as he'd never seen one).

It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.

My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays). I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and channel down a damned TV any more.

Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-CEC) you can control everything with one remote.

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