Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors

My dad is in his 80s. He keeps careful notes on how to use devices like tablets and TVs. There might be a touch of engineer-brain at work here, but the struggle is very real. He generally wouldn't take in all of the text and symbols on a screen if there is a lot of going on, or might get hung up on the wrong parts of it. He generally wouldn't find a modern interface at all "intuitive".

Any change to an interface is going to disrupt this, so one thing would be to change the interface only very rarely and carefully.

I have 3 laptops, a PC and a PC at work and 2 phones. Passkeys still confuse me and I'm not 60 yet.

Instructions on how to create and use a bookmark can help as far as the domain/getting to log in goes. I know nobody RTFMs but if they've got instructions they can follow for that, they'll only need to read it once (hopefully). Hopefully, that will reduce the level of frustration before they try to log in.

Is your product a simple TODO list? Is it a health diary with loads of sensitive information? Is it for storing nuclear codes? Is this something users typically use on shared computers? On their phones? When you consider whether or not some of the other commenters' suggestions for reducing complexity of authc and potentially account recovery are reasonable, you need to keep that context in mind. It's hard to make decent suggestions without that context, imo.

Check WCAG's recommendations around accessibility. Start with cognitive and vision, and make sure to check out sections around designing and interacting with forms, but make sure to have a browse around broadly.

The UK government's style guides have some thoughtful advice around usability and accessibility. [0][1]

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide [1]: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

When I did phone support for the fruit company there was a woman who would come back to me time and again with roughly the same issue.

She had some form of extreme palsy, and her kids lived on a different continent.

What she needed, was someone to talk to her as she tried to input her password the 10 or so times it would take her to get it entered correctly.

If she did it herself, she would become unsure that she was using the correct password, and give up because she was second guessing herself.

If she asked a nurse to help, the nurse would need to bail halfway through the process and address some other requirement.

In a separate incarnation, I was helping a 90 year old gentleman, who was providing free legal support for the organisation, to log on to his laptop. We had a 60 day password reset cycle. This gentleman would only attend the office every month. So every other visit required a password reset. He would berate me as he went, like the guy was a massive d bag. But my understanding was that he had chronic arthritis in his hands, so this process was very painful for him.

I think the best workflow would be to use login codes and eschew passwords entirely. Definitely dont have mandatory password resets. I think the initial Passcode enrollment step might rule passcodes out but I have only really dealt with them on the MS side.

That said, you need a really good non password backstop for login codes, because in my experience, elderly people tend to replace phones/numbers/laptops/email addresses quite frequently too. I used to keep a folder in my password vault for my grandmother so I could recover her email/facebook, but not before she ended up with 3 email accounts and facebook pages.

Biometric Authenticator App? IE key recovery / load to a new phone is biometric, but otherwise it just prompts a 6 digit code on login? I think younger generations have a better sense of "I am X, but my email controls Y" where older people are like "I am me, so give me my emails" and something that is unequivocally "Me" like biometrics might be the best way to meet them where they are.

Just my 2 cents.

54yo here. We (GenX) grew up with computers. It’s the Boomers and Silent Generation that have trouble.