Yayagram

When I'm asked to find some phone or other technology for an elderly relative, I'm always concerned about the usability of devices.

A lot of companies and people don't realy appreciate how much training is really needed to operate even the simplest of mobile phones.

I've not really seen any solutions other than making buttons bigger and reducing menu options, I'm sure these are great for those with deteriorating eyesight, but they aren't really offering anything for a person who has never used a smartphone before.

The real solution has to be usable by someone who has never operated _any_ modern technology - It has to be so simple you could maybe even train a dog to use.

An idea of mine is to have a bank of "walkie talkies" - one for each person you wish to speak to.

And this problem is always growing; my parents haven't retired yet, but even they are struggling to use today's on-demand television. What will happen when digital terrestrial TV is shut down and they have to learn to use whatever new interface is on the successor to the inevitably cancelled Android TV.

Is there a video of a gramma using it?

NUIs: iNuitive User Interfaces used to be (perhaps still is) an interesting design philosophy in the UX space. The goal being to build a system that a brand new user fresh off the boat could walk up to and intuit what the system could do and how to manipulate the system to solve their problems. Though this is complicated by our thought patterns and habits being altered by just interacting with computer systems. So, it becomes hard to pinpoint exactly what "intuitive" means to an audience as wide as the entire population or even small groups like "university students".

Thinking this way becomes incredibly important as systems move from dedicated devices further into coordinated actions of ubiquitous devices.

I work on a company that is squarely targeted at the market of people who don't have Internet. Nearly 10% of Americans don't have Internet, the vast majority are older. During COVID, at least in my family, it was pretty stark. My grandmother didn't see a video of my nephews for essentially a year, as she was quarantined and doesn't know how to use a smartphone or tablet. She also doesn't have WiFi, so 'smart frames' and the like aren't an option (nor is this device unfortunately). It's a real market of real people.

This is incredible, I wish there were more analogue centered devices for older people with both hearing and vision loss. The combination makes it virtually impossible to interact with any well designed software because it's all touch screen and way too complicated. But also makes it impossible to interact with the limited number of phones with analogue buttons because they are usually feature phones with even worse designed software than touchscreen phones and at that point the analogue buttons don't really help at all. So yeah this is truly incredible.