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.
It’s because tech savvy people see digital products like old people would see a thingamajig out of a woodshop. We have an inherent understanding that the thing we’re looking at had a creator intention behind it, as well as an understanding that they may have done a poor job implementing that intention. We understand more underlying patterns to look for. We have a deeper intuition of what is “right” and that any “wrong” can be infinitely different than any other “wrong.” We know the internet isn’t prod; the internet is like your feature branch on steroids. We understand that the internet often uses fancy tricks to scale, and those tricks can lead to behaviors which seem to contradict causality (e.g., distributed systems, you receive a message before it was sent because of eventual consistency). These are problems we’ve been exposed to over and over, forced ourselves to work our way through them, even built some of the machines that had these issues.
Old people had similar advantages with things like housework, woodwork, automotive work, …
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 think a great test is grab a 5 year old budget phone with low screen resolution and slow CPU, and hand it to a few people with your app on it for a few minutes. See what they complain about or can’t figure out.
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?
It’s because tech savvy people see digital products like old people would see a thingamajig out of a woodshop. We have an inherent understanding that the thing we’re looking at had a creator intention behind it, as well as an understanding that they may have done a poor job implementing that intention. We understand more underlying patterns to look for. We have a deeper intuition of what is “right” and that any “wrong” can be infinitely different than any other “wrong.” We know the internet isn’t prod; the internet is like your feature branch on steroids. We understand that the internet often uses fancy tricks to scale, and those tricks can lead to behaviors which seem to contradict causality (e.g., distributed systems, you receive a message before it was sent because of eventual consistency). These are problems we’ve been exposed to over and over, forced ourselves to work our way through them, even built some of the machines that had these issues.
Old people had similar advantages with things like housework, woodwork, automotive work, …
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…
I use my phone like this and it’s annoying how many apps become unusable.
I think a great test is grab a 5 year old budget phone with low screen resolution and slow CPU, and hand it to a few people with your app on it for a few minutes. See what they complain about or can’t figure out.