Comment by bananaowl
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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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.
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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...)
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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.
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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.