Watching an elderly relative trying to use the modern web | Hacker News Reader

Watching an elderly relative trying to use the modern web

48 pointsColinWright20 comments

Watching my elderly mother trying to accomplish something on the internet and I have to say ...

Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.

It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.

I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.

It makes me so angry.

So. Angry.

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Ease of use was always possible. Three factors always mitigated aginst it.

1. It costs willingness and money to do so.

2. Tech is saturated with complexity bias.

3. Let’s face it. Most companies and management are “superior” to users; little Musks and Thiels, just with less power to make people feel inferior. It’s the Curtis Yarvin syndrome, and it’s getting worse, not better.

AI “could” help but AFAICT, general purpose AI, without the guardrails that Thiel and Musks paid boatloads of money to prevent, is just plain dangerous. Witness suicides and more.

I’m 77 and tech was my entire career. I keep up daily via HN. And MY gripe is that I KNOW what’s going on, and how to make it better, at least conceptually, and I see it getting worse. One of my “funnest” little projects was writing up a little app (in Hypercard) for a division director who didn’t know computers from a ham sandwich, and it was just right.

So, when will people

1. Give a damn and spend money to make things usable?

2. Invite “real people” into design discussions?

3. Try to keep things simple?

4. Have a heart instead of a “supremacy” complex?

as I am getting older, I wholeheartedly relate to what you are saying.

1. Some people give a damn, but decision makers won't give them money and resources to fix. Good enough is enough, lets work on next project.

2. Inviting "real people" is expensive, A/B testing is cheaper

3. Complicated 150 page, 120 tab ERP or B2B SaaS can be funded, simple things -> investors are worried that it can be replicated by 1 engineer with Claude Code/Codex at hand

4. Have a heart --- this makes me think, unfortunately we lost it to capitalism. We are even ready to ruin our kids life and their mental health, if it makes money to us

Sad sad sad

I completely agree. Same experience with my father. Sites impossible to navigate.

You’re on your laptop, now go to your phone, find your banking app, enter your PIN code (no not the same one as your ATM card), find the tiny grey scanner icon, scan the QR code on the screen of your laptop, press confirm. Now put down the phone and switch back to the laptop.

Fails 100% of the time.

The Netherlands has a centralized system for signing into all government related web sites. It’s especially egregious. You want to log in? Do NOT press the Login button, press the one saying “connection code”. For “first world” countries that should have no problem understanding the concept of an aging population it should be a criminal offense to roll out this kind of “solution”.

It really has a "login" button that doesn't log in? Does it mean "take the action of going through the door once you have got the key via the connection code man"?

My first direct app is similar. The "Generate a security code" button only appears on the login screen, not after you've logged in. It used to be covered by a pop up. Now when I open the app it auto logs me in with face ID and I have to actively log out to get to it. The code in my case is used to log into their website. The first time I tried I had to phone them and say "eh? how's it work?"

This (elderly) is the ultimate UX test that most products and apps and websites fail miserably. Modern UX is a joke.

I wonder how we got so low from standing on the giants shoulders in the early days (I still miss my Sony Clie Palm OS organizer as being superior in its main goal organizing than any ios app I've tried after that).

Were we working for too long inside our comfy IT bubble echo chamber?

Or is it just a general quality problem and 2% law? With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area (there is not much opportunities for innovation there to hype and inflate your CV with).

> With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area

My take is that design stopped being for the user. It's a rat race on who will make it look the most fancy or closest to whatever new trend AirBnB starts as quickly as possible. More animations, more colors, darker, lighter, let's make this transparent. Noone really thinks about UX anymore, it's all just portfolio-driven-design.

Great phrase “protfolio driven design”, together with “cv driven software engineering” they contribute to “metrics (not even profits) driven businesses”.

Did end users ever had any leverage or it was always like this, I wonder

I am of the same opinion watching them attempt to use modern UIs. When Windows 3.11 was released, it came with a manual that told you how everything worked, and how to interact with it. Windows 95 was also exceptionally logical.

The modern UIs are awful, since buttons sometimes look like links, scrollbars randomly disappear (and their direction for mouse scrolling is opposite to what they were for decades), interaction requires gestures that are not obvious at all, and all of this is even worse on a touchscreen where you are reduced to groping and fumbling around with it - who would know that swiping left or right on a list element means "delete"??

Poor show all round. It is an endemic problem where modern OS manufacturers change interactions every couple of releases, marginally enough to make the object irritating and useless to use.

Trying to pay a bill. On the website ... it took 24 minutes to navigate to the right place. Then they needed 2FA, so they emailed it to her.

Now she's supposed to open her email while keeping the web page open. It took 5 minutes to do that, find the email, copy down the code, close the email ...

Web site has timed out.

Just one of many examples.

We actually solved this problem once and then deliberately unsolved it. Skeuomorphic design — the beveled buttons, the underlined blue links, the scrollbars that looked like physical scrollbars — wasn't just aesthetic preference. It was an affordance language that leveraged decades of physical-world intuition. You see a raised button, you know it can be pressed. You see underlined blue text, you know it goes somewhere.

And then around 2012-2013 we collectively decided that looked "dated" and replaced it with flat rectangles that may or may not be buttons, text that may or may not be links, and scroll areas with invisible scrollbars that appear only on hover — which of course assumes you know where to hover. The entire visual vocabulary got stripped out in favor of... cleanliness?

What's genuinely perverse is that this happened simultaneously with the web becoming mandatory infrastructure. You can't opt out of paying your electric bill online in a lot of places now. So we took the interface that 80-year-olds had finally learned to navigate, ripped out every visual clue that made it navigable, and then told them the alternative was a phone tree that also doesn't work.

Old people shouldn’t be on the internet. Most people shouldn’t be on the internet. Most of the internet shouldn’t even exist. I’m sure most here feel differently. So be it.

Some place tried to tell us that my 104 year old grandmother needed to get an email address to pay a bill. She was in hospice. We’re not setting up a new email account.

Hah, I catch myself relying on Developer Tools to get things done online increasingly often. Every now and then it has me thinking three things:

- Is it me, or is the "modern UX design" meant to maximize frustration?

- What happened to QA?

- How do "normal" people even get by at all these days?

Your post, while a sad read, reassured me that I'm not crazy.

Not sure what you mean by "the modern web", but if it's the ads and popups, I can only recommend NextDNS. It blocks spam, offensive content etc. on dns level. Obviously you have to trust them, but it makes the web usable again to me and my family.

Yup. Same here. Combo of car infotainment systems and smartphones are what did me in. Every bit of software made these days seems designed to produce maximum anxiety or friction to the elderly. It's one thing when you're developing it and it becomes second nature because you built the damn thing right? Walk away for 6 months, or a year, then come back. It's a fucking nightmare.

At this point, I truly fear that if we don't inject more humanity into the tech sector, ya know, kindness, empathy, appreciation for those in an increasingly degraded cognitive state; we're definitely building ourselves a hell we 100% deserve for the hubris on display.

I have experience with elderly trying to use a mobile phone. No, not a smart phone, just a basic brick before smart phone was a thing. It was painful to see how incapable of retaining the most basic information they were. So no, the web is no the problem. The common denominator is age and loss of neuroplasticity.

It would be informative to watch elderly people of different types try and use the new web, those that are functionaly illiterate, those that have lost reading skills, and those that are highly literate retired profesionals.

I can't get any devices to understand my mother. She speaks to SIRI or Google Nest, incredibly difficult or impossible. She has to either repeat herself a half dozen times in between asking Google Nest to stop. It is a shit show just having it play a radio station. Her fingers are so dry that she can't use a tablet. My mother inlaw has had huge success with META Glasses but unfortunately my mother won't wear them. Really hoping AI can fix things and provide older folks with a way to communicate easily.

Years ago, before Web 3.0, my Mom decided she wanted a computer to do email and genealogy. I bought her one. In one of her first sessions she held the mouse about 8 inches above the mousepad and asked why nothing was happening (shades of Star Trek). When I was showing the family some pictures featuring water on my laptop she said, "It looks so real!", and kept poking the screen with her finger, which produced those colorful (diffraction?) patterns, exclaiming, "It's like water!". I kept saying, "Mom, stop", until my older brother said, "Mom, I think he wants you to stop poking the screen like that."

Even basic computer use is hard for older folks. I can't imaging what they are going through now. I get frustrated every day with the crap we have to deal with, and I'm an IT Guy. Don't even talk to me about AI.

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