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.

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”.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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