Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone
“The menu button”
“There is no menu button”
“It’s a hamburger icon”
“What?”
“3 lines”
“How is that a menu?”
I often help my parents use their phones.
It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:
Buttons and tabs can be any combination of Colored Square, White Square with Outline or Grey Text on White Background (and they switch every screen!)
Modals without a scroll bar so you can’t tell there’s a “Confirm” button at the bottom
Awfully confusing share dialogs before the Native system share sheet opens
Inconsistent iconography
Overflow menus hidden behind 3 dots, 3 lines or neither
I feel like it’s almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.
Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.
I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.
It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.
My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.
We’ve got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.
If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.
Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”
I often help my parents use their phones.
It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:
I feel like it’s almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.
And then we have insanity like Instagram, where the logo opens a separate area
How the hell does the logo ever load anything but the home screen?
Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.
I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.
It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.
My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.
We’ve got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.
I’m working on a mobile app, this commentary is very helpful to me.
If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.
I know responsive design is hard but damn…