> The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.
Nooooo they do not do this. If they did, modern UIs wouldn't confuse my elderly parents much worse than old ones did.
Dear all tech companies (but looking at you, Google, since they won't stop buying cheap Android phones): every time you decide to have some full-screen horseshit notification pop up on an action, instead of doing the usual thing (say, a "hey, update this for new stuff!" thing) I get a fucking phone call to help "fix it". Goddamn stop it, the rest of us hate that too (my intent was to open the app to do something, so don't get in my way) but it's usability poison for the olds.
That includes those new tabs in Firefox every time there's an update. It's confusing. Stop it. Oh, and FF, bring back normal-ass menus, because my parents (unfortunately) use Windows. Browsers have proven Apple right all along with forcing the top-of-screen "file, edit, view..." menu, since apparently even major vendors can't be trusted to do the sane thing with those instead of cramming it all in some mysterious kitchen-sink button-opened dropdown.