Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors

I've assisted my grandparents with the same UIs many times, it's just harder to learn things the older you are.

For example, there was a service my gradmother used pretty frequently, which required a password change once every 6 months. She memorized the regular login flow, but she always called us for help when the flow broke and asked her to invent a new password, provide the old password, and confirm with an SMS code.

None of it is inherintly complex or difficult, but when you're at that age, and not super tech-savvy to begin with, computers are super confusing.

I wonder about a scheme using public key encryption where a scannable code is displayed on the log-in screen, where one has an app on a phone that can match it and send an authorization to the site for login.

Moves the complexity to unlocking a phone and starting an app.

I am also 54 years old, and I've grown up with every single user interface conceivable in a computer or device.

However, though that gives me an advantage in knowledge of how the systems work, I don't think I'm very good at navigating modern user interfaces.

My hypothesis goes like this: the people who are writing graphical user interfaces today are video gamers. They were playing twitch games and first person shooters until they got hired to program a user interface. The people who write them, and the people who use them, think nothing of split second reaction times and hand-eye coordination in order to navigate a user interface.

This is a very very bad approach. You should not need reaction times to navigate a user interface of an app that is used for business or what have you. The web is full of dynamic flows and ever-changing presentation. This is very detrimental to our mental health.

I believe that it's the inconsistent presentation of the interface and the ever-changing buttons and the ever updating methods of interacting that are so detrimental. It can really hurt someone who is on the edge of dementia or mental issues. Even the sanest people must have trouble navigating these things.

Every office program and every social media app has settings and configuration more complex than flying a 747. We should not need a pilot certification just to get through these settings. The settings multiply quite deliberately, so that they confuse and beguile the user and get us to give up! If the settings panel presents 1000 settings then we are far more likely to just leave them alone then try and manage them all. Especially when they are ephemeral and basically change themselves upon every update!

The problem is not with elderly people or with their mental status. It is with the very poor presentation and the video games that now rule our everyday life. Even a point of sale or a public computer kiosk is presenting these issues. There is something very wrong with that.

Yubikey for auth, thats all, no fn user/password needed. Presses it when blinks, and done.

My Dad could never build the metal model to understand that common concepts like copy/paste would work almost identically across different native Windows applications; "How do I copy/paste in an email?", "How do I copy/paste in a Word document?", "How do I open a file in Excel?", "How do I open a file in Word?".

The lightbulb just never went on in his head. And this was in the 90s and early 2000s when developers at least used MFC - probably the period of peak UX design.

Things have now gotten so much worse since then. Now, I struggle to remember how to add an attachment in MS Teams, which I use every day.