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Yayagram

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Re: Yayagram

#53

On top of the points others in this thread have made, I think this is also a lesson for UX designers. It's really obvious how the Yayagram works and how to use it and this is how our UX should be.

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, i…

Does NUI not stand for Natural User Interface? iNtuitive is definitely Non-intuitive.

Re: Yayagram

#54
post #32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, let me put this another way, since I'm being downvoted. I think my 70 year old mum, who is a grandma, would find it patronising and sexist to have a device pitched to her as an easier to use version of the iPad she is a bloody master of in every way. She's far more adapt than my dad, bless him, but even he can use WhatsApp and the like fine after being shown.

FWIW, the author’s grandmother is twenty-six years older than your mother: https://twitter.com/mrcatacroquer/status/1386318879572570112 > My Yaya is Felisa Romano Martin, from Segovia, 96 years old, and she is the best Yaya in the world.

That tweet goes along with an impressive picture of the Alcázar de Segovia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site medieval castle: https://www.eladelantado.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ALc%... [1]

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alc%C3%A1zar_of_Segovia

[1] Source (Spanish): https://www.eladelantado.com/segovia/la-imagen-segovia/

Re: Yayagram

#55
post #47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love it but is it really obvious how the jack connection thing works? I would imagine only to former switchboard operators and modular synthesizer players.

The cable could be replaced with a rotary switch with stops for each recipient. I’d also add a picture of each grandchild in addition to the name. But overall, this is an awesome idea :-)

I could see this, maybe each time the dial settles into its little ka-thunk index might also play “hello grandma” in the grandchild’s voice.

Re: Yayagram

#56
post #29

On top of the points others in this thread have made, I think this is also a lesson for UX designers. It's really obvious how the Yayagram works and how to use it and this is how our UX should be.

What's the lesson here? Yes this is a simple UI, but if put next to an iPhone which one will a billion+ people pick?

Although the iPhone is a more popular device it doesn't fill the accessability needs of all users. Just as many countries have disabilities acts for manufacturing and civil engineering, shouldn't technology and platforms have something similar?

Re: Yayagram

#57
This is really neat. It has me thinking about my own grandma who loves getting pictures on her phone, but is that the best interface for her? What if I could send pictures and they'd automatically print out, I think she'd like that even more. I think it's funny because that's a pretty easy thing to set up, but I never considered it until now.

Re: Yayagram

#58

On top of the points others in this thread have made, I think this is also a lesson for UX designers. It's really obvious how the Yayagram works and how to use it and this is how our UX should be.

As a former UX designer, this is a wonderful device and I love it. It was clearly made with a particular user in mind and they thoughtfully designed around the user constraints.

It’s effective because it’s as simple as possible, and relies heavily (as pointed out by the designer multiple times) on very old metaphors like switchboards, telegrams, and binary state indicator lights. It feels obvious because these metaphors have been in our lives for decades, so we’re very familiar with them. But it doesn’t mean that we didn’t have to learn them at one point. It’s sort of like how the Beatles sound like regular music today, but in their heyday they made very new sounds and lots of people thought it was shit music.

I feel like UX designers are devalued because they often seem to create irritation rather than harmony. Let me tell you, it’s a real pain in the ass making harmonious experiences when you’re playing second fiddle to short term business goals, or even third fiddle to short term engineering constraints. I would love to go into Gmail and declare it a finished product and get the whole team to spend a year figuring out which features we can strip out to simplify the product and design it holistically like this Yayagram, but it’s a terrible business decision so we’re not doing it.

In real life, UX designers are there simply to prevent large apps from devolving into CRUD hell, and it’s nearly Sisyphean.

Re: Yayagram

#59
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem we have faced, unfortunately, is the proliferation of modern security features. Chromebooks are awesome in many ways for the elderly, but the fact that you can't disable password entry at startup has been a dealbreaker for my aging father. He can't type easily and is beginning to struggle with passwords. Paradoxically, this means that he's still running his Ubuntu laptop (he has been using UNIX sy…

You might want to try him with a password manager.

It seems tempting to solve technological problems with more technology, but my experience is more technology is more problems. The password manager will update/ask for updates. It will ask about auto fill or saving passwords, etc. The people with password understanding problems definitely don’t understand password management problems!

Re: Yayagram

#60
My thoughts are that the font should be larger for the names and and for the text output. Ideally include pictures next to the names, so even if it's hard to read, it would be easy to spot who you want to connect to. I didn't see it, but you also probably need a notification to reload the paper roll as you come to the end. This could be a warning LED and it could also be a warning text sent to some or all of the people on the other end of the YAYAGRAM that Yaya is running low on paper, can you help her reload?
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