
Don Norman on how design fails older consumers - probably_wrong
https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me
======
nilram
My partner's mom, age 94, got new hearing aids and the app that can control
them (adjust focus on front/side/back, high/low/midrange, etc), runs only on
iOS. We got her an iPad mini and I set it up so she can (A) read the
Washington Post, (B) read a poetry app, (C) control her hearing aids, and (D)
not much else (so as not to be confusing).

Much to my surprise, the hearing aid app does not adjust it's font size per
the iOS system settings, and it does not have any font adjustment of it's own.
It also has a background picture that interferes with focusing on controls.
I'm boggled that a company producing a product for those with hearing-
impairment doesn't recognize that many of it's users may be in age-related
decline, and that can include vision and cognitive impairment.

~~~
wereHamster
Most likely the app was written by a third-party contractor who didn't know
much about who the users are, they only received the requirements (app must do
X and Y) and delivered.

~~~
nilram
Absolutely. That’s why I’ll be contacting the hearing aid company, who is
ultimately responsible for those requirements.

------
EricE
The trend towards lack of physical controls in cars is absolutely bonkers. I'm
gobsmacked anyone thinks the Tesla Model 3 is good design.

Same with desk phones. Anyone who deals with customers at a counter doesn't
have time to constantly look at a touch screen for buttons that may or may not
be there. Nothing like chucking muscle memory out the window in the name of
aesthetics :p

~~~
marnett
Unfortunately I think it’s more about pricing as oppposed to better design
paradigms. Replacing embedded system engineers with cheap java engineers? Yea
that requires a screen.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Similar to capacitive touch panels on appliances. You'd think this sci-fi look
is more expensive to make, but it's actually cheaper. The "buttons" have no
moving parts.

~~~
tty2300
And should last longer, make it easier to clean and not get gunk stuck in it
causing it to jam up.

~~~
Moru
And make the driver look at a screen to adjust temperature / fan or whatever.

~~~
logicprog
I already have to look at the knobs in my car to see what I'm doing with them
(or even find them in the first place). Is this true for anyone else? I'm
reading this thread totally unable to understand what we are arguing about
haha.

~~~
marcosdumay
Temperature settings have famously bad controllers. I guess it's because they
are new, and car designers didn't have time to compete on quality of those
yet.

You can control the radio of any high-end 00's car without looking at the
controls.

~~~
fuzzfactor
Back in the early 70s, before the energy _crisis_ when the speed limit had
never been reduced below 70, everybody went 90 (and I passed everybody).

Auto air conditioning was a great luxury to have, especially in the deep south
on a multi-hour tollway through wilderness with no exits for miles on either
side of the pavement.

Of course gasoline was still commonly available with over 100 octane rating
for prices less expensive than milk.

And most cars had a regular ordinary V8 engine.

On the typical GM car, AC controls were like this:

[https://www.rickscamaros.com/productmedia/catalog_product_ga...](https://www.rickscamaros.com/productmedia/catalog_product_gallery/index/id/21539/image/0/)

Many drivers never went anywhere without their good buddies "MAX" and "NORM".

And this is what was in a Ford:

[https://secure.cougarpartscatalog.com/c9zz-19a884-a.html](https://secure.cougarpartscatalog.com/c9zz-19a884-a.html)

Notice how there is only one sliding selector for all the main exclusive
functions, each well separated physically and tactically and labeled well.
Each company has almost the same identical functions arranged with a similar
but not identical order and nomenclature. Regardless each company shows a
logical spectrum of functions from left-to-right.

The other continuous slider is for temperature, and a third slider on an
opposing axis for the fan setting (closer to the driver when center-mounted)
since that's the one you change most often. Other than the fan, the other
settings often remain unchanged across multiple rides in the most ideal
expected usage scenarios.

Obviously Max was quite popular with both Ford and GM, and it seems
intuitively instinctive as the most cold you are going to get, but it's really
just the Recirculate setting, while Norm is for Fresh outside air coming in
across your cooling coils, which is what it says on the Ford.

All of this being fully documented in the handy owner's manual in the glove
compartment, but even the least technically oriented people usually figured it
all out quite easily on their own. Without even looking. If you did have to
page through the book at least it was (much) faster than a PDF.

You could say there is very great similarity between both of these major
competing control panels, or alternatively maybe there are only superficial
differences in these co-operating engineering approaches.

The temperature can be completely set tactically across the entire range with
no unanticipated discomfort, even though there is no thermostat, you are
simply choosing across a continuous range of what is available under the
prevailing environmental conditions. Which therefore required occasional
tweaking en route, on this type of early 70s fully-analog system this critical
physical adjustment was most-often accomplished when needed by real-time fine-
motor actuation under the direct control of _usually_ natural intelligence.
Yeah, there was some total system latency, with largely unavoidable
contributions from this type of hardware, but occasionally the intelligence
level itself was not up to even average expectations which can add the most
noticable deficiency. Some things never change.

On some Cadillacs there was an actual system thermostat handled transparently
by the same control panel, and when "digital" there was a fancy numerical
indicator but you didn't need to take your eyes off the road to set the
temperature as exactly as you would like using the same control panel either.

Well, that's most of the cars on the road having AC, Chrysler/AMC was much
smaller and most imports were Volkswagens (without AC) still concentrated in
and nearby port cities where there were foreign-car dealers, parts, and
mechanics having metric tools. If you drove a Volkswagen micro-bus across a
number of states to get to Woodstock in 1969, during most of the trip there
was no expected source of repair, tools, or supplies, even tires.

Out on the Turnpike they had some good pavement designed for 100mph along all
arcs (even when iced over as often as _that_ happens in Florida) but the
regular two-lane roads out in the middle of nowhere were quite wavy after
decades of overweight citrus trailers and going 100 on them was like constant
air turbulence. It made your voice wavy while the occasional semi was bouncing
toward you at 80mph themself. Sometimes when you are in their lane passing one
of them simultaneously. The approaching big truck required a certain amount of
pavement on your side of the center line since the roads were built when semis
were narrower and there was not a lot of traffic out there way back then
anyway.

At least the cars were over-engineered for better structural integrity (using
a slide rule), but were mostly less capable of precise handling compared to
21st century offerings.

But you really didn't want to take your eyes off the road.

Well that was when Moon landings were a regular occurrence too, so you have to
figure at certain times in history you had to be a lot further above average
to get very far in engineering or technical areas compared to today.

Even though technology has come a long way over the decades (and centuries) in
some ways (in some places) average people themselves were more advanced then
compared to now.

A lot more effort is needed to build _foolproof_ systems simply because there
are a lot more fools and they are getting more determined than ever.

This of course can be confirmed by direct observation over the long term.

There is still no indication that less-than-natural intelligence will ever be
an adequate substitute when performing difficult (but commonly expected)
efforts like in the old days. Especially when the natural stuff is trending
downward at an increasing rate itself.

~~~
marcosdumay
Well, by late 90's and early 00's, designers where exploiting the all-
electronic properties of radio systems so that the driver could operate them
not only without looking, but also without taking the hands out of the wheel.
Yet, those 70's temperature controls would still be as good as the state of
the art.

There was evolution. But it only happened when manufacturers would lose market
share if they didn't do something that doesn't suck.

By its turn, nowadays cars are making it so that drivers must take their eyes
out of the road to even look at the fucking speed indicator. We have seen some
incredibly quick technology loss.

------
areoform
Thoughtless design is everywhere. My company uses Discord for comms and I’m
active in several Discord communities, but my vision impaired co-worker isn’t.
Not because of a lack of want, but because Discord has been coasting on
accessible design for years.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/4tn00z/when_wil...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/4tn00z/when_will_discord_be_accessible_to_those_who_use/)
Everything takes more resources than we expect, but surely a theme for their
client (we do have some proof that it is theme-able) that is friendlier for
screen readers shouldn’t take more time than an entire games store?

For me, the big takeaway from this article and companies like Discord is that
people just don’t seem to care. And that’s often the status quo until an Apple
comes along. We forget this, but back before the resurgence of Apple design
was an afterthought, not a forethought even though there were obvious gains to
be had and a better future to lead towards. But the vast majority of companies
avoided the obvious win until Apple’s stock price shocked them into caring.

A significant fraction of everyone’s user base (including the core users)
would benefit from accessible and thoughtful design, because like the article
says, we’re all disabled sometimes. Now, we just need to figure out which
company will have to show the world how to do it.

~~~
save_ferris
The dismal accessibility adoption on the web is horrendous, but working for a
company that has to deliver accessible web apps to comply with Federal law has
really opened my eyes to how terrible to ecosystem of accessibility is.

My team spends about a quarter of our time working strictly on accessibility,
and we find ourselves straying from the beaten path often in order to
accommodate a specific screenreader/OS combo. We run into situations all the
time where we're unable to get insight from the docs because something is
buried deep in the spec.

We also have to draw a line in the sand about which screenreaders to support
and which ones to pass on, which pisses off clients that use screenreaders
that we don't support.

Automated accessibility audit results sometimes contradict documentation
around best practices, which can be frustrating.

The other thing I've learned is that developers usually hate working on
accessibility issues because the screenreaders are much less intuitive to use
and can really muck up your workflow if you're trying to ensure that an
interface is completely accessible.

While I agree that we as a community can do better, I think that web
accessibility in its current form is largely a failure because people see it
as a cost that they're not interested in incurring, possibly because of the
issues I've listed above.

~~~
ssivark
Since website frameworks like Bootstrap are a thing, would it make sense to
implement accessibility guidelines at that level, so that designers/people who
don't know are encouraged to use sane defaults?

Or is it too content/layout specific?

Eg: I might like to roll my own static blog, but I don't know how to ensure
that it is accessible.

~~~
save_ferris
I think making frameworks like bootstrap accessible-by-default is a great
idea, but it won't be catch-all solution. A11y needs to be a conscious part of
the design/development process, just like security.

One of the things we've learned is that much of the complex, dynamic UI things
one can do with frameworks like React/Angular is really, really, really hard
and frustrating to make fully accessible because people never design React
components that are easy to use with a keyboard.

We live in this world where the capabilities of UIs for enabled people
continue to grow at the cost of accessibility for the disabled. With the shift
towards frontend frameworks, the problem needs to be addressed at the markup
level IMO.

------
RyJones
I characterize this as "all PMs have perfect eyes and skin". The first
iteration of the Microsoft Surface featured a micro SD slot that was unusable
if you had anything less than perfect, pliable finger nails. I cracked a nail
so many times using that slot I gave up.

Current generation Apple designers clearly have amazing vision: part numbers
on light grey on white in microscopic fonts.

~~~
skookumchuck
I've had a lot of trouble entering the Windows serial numbers when installing
Windows. The B and 8 look alike, ditto for O and 0. I've had to use a
magnifying glass on it.

Apple's online documentation pages have also tended to be light grey fonts on
white. My eyes would ache trying to read them. I find their choices baffling.
It's like they were so focused on design they forgot about people simply
wanting to read it.

~~~
Teckla
_I 've had a lot of trouble entering the Windows serial numbers when
installing Windows. The B and 8 look alike, ditto for O and 0. I've had to use
a magnifying glass on it._

This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine. So many codes require digits _and_
letters these days -- why not _just_ digits?! It would be so much more user
friendly, especially when using a smartphone keyboard.

~~~
skookumchuck
Yes, I'd rather just use a longer password that is easier to type.

------
Causality1
For some reason companies hate text now. Instead of a menu, you get icons with
as minimalistic a design and as little difference between them as possible.
Entering your user name and password is two separate pages for some reason
now. Window borders have disappeared so instead of knowing at a glance where
you can click and drag you have to closely watch your mouse pointer change. A
big "Hewwo 2 U!" screen is added between turning your computer on and being
able to enter your password as if you foolishly left your desktop in your
jeans pocket and Windows wants to make sure you're not pocket-PowerPointing.

It's like they're trying to alienate everyone not intimately familiar with the
system and appeal to the lowest common denominator at the same time.

~~~
__alias
I for one like the material minimalistic menu items we get now. (Assuming they
use standard material design icons) it makes it quickly recognisable and
accessible.

~~~
Causality1
If you use them constantly. For example, most of my Gmail use is on an android
device, which has a radically different UI than the web mail. When I use the
web mail, probably once a month or so, I have to use tool tips every time
because I've forgotten which tiny grey on grey button is reply, which is spam,
etc.

------
altitudinous
I'm 51 and work in tech. I now understand the nuances in this article. I'll
probably understand them better as time goes on.

Young readers probably skimmed over the bits about floaters in the eyes.
Everyone older than 50 gets it.

Young readers probably skimmed over the bit about frequency definition,
captions etc. Everyone older than 50 gets it.

I don't get the bit with walking sticks yet, but I am not there yet. But I
realise that.

I was young and bulletproof once - even up until 5 years ago I didn't
understand what this article was about. I gather by reading the comments here
that most don't. The challenge is explaining ageing to anyone under the age of
about 45, when it is entirely out of their scope of experience, in a
demographic who think they know it all. Ageism is embedded in our society,
whose best attempt at inclusion and diversity is based on colour of skin and
gender. I don't think it will change, it has probably been the same for
thousands of years.

I had to go around to a friend of my mothers the other day - in her 70's, her
younger relatives had switched off captions on her Samsung TV. She had no idea
how to turn them back on. It is hidden about four layers deep in the fu.king
menus. Why isn't it a button an on/off button on the remote? Another button
amongst the 20 already there? In the manual - It got a paragraph mention about
30 pages in, in a tiny font. So discriminatory. I am seriously thinking of
making a career of this, while I still can!!!

~~~
dr_dshiv
Is it just me, or do TVs have the WORST user experience of all tech? Somehow,
they can get away with it.

I've always wanted a consumer electronics brand that was known specifically
for usability. For commodity tech, like TVs, radios, monitors, music, I don't
want the most impressive specs -- I want a brand that means "we will be easier
to use than the other brands".

Choosing between Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc etc.. it's all meaningless. Give me
a BRAND that says "easy-to-use".

~~~
ghaff
I honestly don't find TVs that hard to use--but then I don't try to use "Smart
TV" features, which are indeed pretty bad across the board. I mostly just use
a Chromecast--a much underappreciated device--and my tablet or laptop.
Hopefully Google doesn't discontinue it when they get bored in a year or two.

~~~
jodrellblank
Is there a term for comments which are indistinguishable from astroturfing? A
kind of Poe's Law of advertising?

------
sn41
I'm a technology enthusiast in my 40s. Even I lose my patience, to say nothing
of people of my parents' generation, when I try to travel to a new country
which has a different set of showers, cooking ranges and washing
machines/dryers.

To say nothing of older people I've seen on flights who struggle to turn on
their entertainment consoles.

Turning on a device should not be a puzzle-solving exercise. As Alan Kay said,
"Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." Too
often, the user interfaces make complex things doable, and simple things
possible, with great effort.

(Also I don't know if this is a thing in design methodologies : I prefer if
designers avoid having basic functionalities as a result of a sequence of
steps, rather, I like to have them as separate top-level buttons)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Also I don 't know if this is a thing in design methodologies : I prefer if
> designers avoid having basic functionalities as a result of a sequence of
> steps, rather, I like to have them as separate top-level buttons_

It is if you care about ergonomics - the rule is, the more frequent an action,
the less key/mouse/fingerpresses it should take to invoke.

It is not if you only care to make it look pretty, good for the demo or to
encite first-time users to subscribe to your SaaS.

------
ssivark
I speculate whether this observation indicates that most of the chatter around
"design" is signaling focused on appearing hip/trendy -- largely a branding
effort overlaid on top of company goals, rather than an effort to think
through actual user needs from the ground up. That would explain why so much
of the focus is on fads.

~~~
btown
There is a hive mind of designers, but one must follow this hive mind to
remain relevant. It is actually the case that skeuomorphic design, all the
rage less than a decade ago, would be a turnoff to users today. Now, could
this be because people associate good design with successful new products, and
those new products have happened to use a different UI mentality for no other
reason than signaling to a design-minded minority? Perhaps. But those new
products do indeed exist, and they have truly moved the goalposts. One must
follow design trends or perish.

~~~
double0jimb0
Or maybe design is just entertainment. It’s a story that keeps the monkey mind
engaged in what is most likely a banal exercise.

------
ken
As usual, design is mostly universal. Besides issues of strength, there's
actually not much here which is specific to age. These are design issues for
all.

> Loud restaurants are torture. So, more and more, my wife and I select
> restaurants by their noise level rather than by their food quality. At home
> while watching TV, whether shows, streaming events, or movies, we always
> turn on the captions, which often block critical parts of the image. Even
> worse, when a film shows someone speaking in a foreign language, the film
> often translates the words, but so too does the closed captioning, and the
> two are placed on top of one another, making both attempts to help the
> viewer completely unhelpful.

I'm (only) in my 30's and every one of these applies to me and my friends, as
well.

~~~
gliop
Loud restaurants do that intentionally to scare off old unsexy people and to
make customers leave sooner for faster turnaround.

Netflix does captioning very well.

------
eigenspace
Thought provoking article.

One difficult thing to grapple with here though is that my impression of the
elderly is that the bulk of them are living on a tight budget to make sure
that their retirement savings last them through their remaining years. Well
designed, hip and beautiful products typically come at a hefty premium (think
Apple tax). How many elderly people are willing to pay a premium for good,
user friendly design?

Could it be that the reason we _don 't_ see better design for the elderly is
because most of them are unwilling or unable to pay extra for it, unlike the
young?

~~~
mixmastamyk
As a group they have much more money than poor college students.

~~~
eigenspace
I think that’s a shallow analysis.

The difference is that college students expect to make more money in the
future so they don’t put any thought into stretching their dollar. Retirees
are the opposite. They may have bigger bank accounts, but for most of them,
they know that’s all they’ll ever get.

------
OscarTheGrinch
The article makes some good points about not talking down to older people, but
here's the thing the article misses: aspiration. Advertisers test all sorts of
messaging before they roll out a large campaign, if empowered old people sold
units we would already see more of them in ads. Advertising is largely playing
on the target audiences emotions, selling them an idealized form of themselves
if only they brought X product.

Old people dont aspire to be old. They are, for the most part, quite happy to
buy products fronted by younger people who remind them of their younger
selves. So the missing grey dollar goldrush this article bemones is largely
already being served, and its worth considering that most ads must
simultaneously reach multiple demographics, would you aspire to drink old lady
coke?

Advertisers are not stupid.

~~~
SyneRyder
The Coke ads currently in Australia (and apparently from the UK) feature an
elderly man trying a Coke No Sugar for the first time, who then goes on to ask
"What else haven't I tried?" and tick off a bucket list while Queen's "I Want
To Break Free" plays in the background. There's absolutely ways to do it if
you want to.

[https://youtu.be/O223tQkCuag](https://youtu.be/O223tQkCuag)

------
everdrive
There are some places where this is going well, such as the firefox reading
pane. Nearly every article can be switched to the pane, and you can choose the
font size and readability. (Sepia is high contrast, but easy on the eyes.) I'm
glad this is being brought up, and I love the tone of article, too. What's
merely annoying for me right now (I'm in my mid-30s) will be untenable when
I'm 65. Design can be better.

The other alternative, of course, is to opt out of some of this technology.
iPhones aren't great for the elderly? Well, dumbphones are making a small
comeback and are much easier to use.

------
rwmj
Don Norman's book _" The Design of Everyday Things"_ is a classic and very
relevant today: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-MIT-
Press/dp...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-MIT-
Press/dp/0262525674/)

~~~
stevenwoo
I've read this book three or four times and it's kind of crazy he was at Apple
as an executive and had no lasting impact, iOS is now full of hidden
gestures/features with low discoverability/intuitiveness. Nobody there with
the power to make decisions agrees with the basic premise of this book.

~~~
ghaff
On the other hand, Donald Norman also came to embrace (and somewhat found) the
idea of User Experience design. He pretty much admitted that his earlier focus
on design was too narrow. And I'd argue that Apple very much likewise
broadened their focus to the entire user experience.

------
louprado
Regarding a comment the author made in passing:

 _For the increasing number of people who have cataract surgery, the eye’s
lenses have ben replaced with plastic, which usually have a fixed focus.
(Artificial lenses that can be focused are under development.)_

My dad recently had cataract surgery and I just assumed he was getting would
be a deformable lens that would give him the ability to focus again. Does
anyone know why it is so hard to develop such a lens ? As far as medical
breakthroughs it seems like low hanging fruit and most people over the age of
45 could benefit from such a surgery since that is the age at which our lenses
begin to harden and can no longer be shaped by our ciliary muscles.

~~~
all2
> Does anyone know why it is so hard to develop such a lens ? As far as
> medical breakthroughs it seems like low hanging fruit ...

Not in medicine or medical research, so great grains of salt required.

1) immune rejection

2) non-degradable

3) same modulus of elasticity as a biological lens (and maintains elasticity)

4) (relatively) cheap source materials

5) (relatively) cheap manufacture

6) survive all testing; up to FDA approval

Can anyone in medicine comment on this?

~~~
beautifulfreak
There's a relevant article on the HN front page now.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-gore-artificial-
corn...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-gore-artificial-cornea/)

~~~
fhars
No, that‘s about cornea replacements and is irrelevant for the current
discussion.

------
jungletime
A glaring example of this is the Canada Revenue Agency. It asks 5 different
security questions, you need to type in the answer to, before you can set up
account.

The problems I observed my elderly father having is:

1) The website times out way too soon. Before my father could type up three
answers it timed out. Each time he has to start from scratch.

2) An answer to security a question, like "who was your first teacher" Can
have many variations.

Did he type in first and last name? Was the first name before the last name or
the last name before the first name? Did he capitalize the letters? Did he
spell the name correctly, its been many years. Did he make any typos.

~~~
fiblye
I'm not even old and I hate security questions like this. I'll never forget
the name of my best friend in 2nd grade, but I will forget whether I input his
name as Billy Bob, Billy, William, William Robert, etc.

~~~
ghaff
I'd say in a typical list of security questions I would consistently answer
maybe a third of them (and those are mostly ones that a determined scammer
could find the answers to). And that's assuming that the service is forgiving
in terms of abbreviations, spelling variants, the presence of words like Road,
etc.

The worst I saw recently was a mandatory security question about "What was the
first city you visited?" The answer was multiple choice with about 6 city
names.

------
geuszb
My theory on this is that it is easier for designers to empathize with users
who are the same age or younger, since in these situations they've had the
experience of the user's age, whereas very few designers have had the
experience of being old (save for the author of TFA).

~~~
gav
It's hard to empathize with abstract people, you need to observe and engage
actual people in their environment, which costs time and money. Too often
people are stuck in a conference room talking about personas. I've ended up
frustrated at clients telling them "you are not your customers" endless times.

It's amazing how much you learn getting out and talking to customers. One of
my favorite examples is for a company that sold plumbing supplies to
contractors. The biggest feedback was that these guys spent most of the day in
a truck and needed to be able to place orders on their phones and they begged
the team to make sure that all the buttons (and links) were much bigger so
that their fat fingers could click on them: "this was designed by a pianist".

There's so many examples of interactions that show that the designer didn't
understand what the end user is really trying to do. My bank makes me enter a
first and last name for transfer recipients, but only use the last name on the
confirmation step, however the bulk of my transfers are to family members!

~~~
gliop
Personas are a massive improvement over designing for yourself or worse
designing for what's fun to design.

~~~
marcosdumay
Are they?

If you design for yourself at least you are using a real person. Personas are
invariably about the same as designing for what's fun.

------
mirimir
Strap wrenches are great for jar lids. I sometimes use two. One for the jar,
and one for the lid.

------
xg15
I fear the effects of this are amplified by the current unfortunate trend of
using dark pattern and strategic use of friction to steer the user into
desired directions.

Congrats, your gray-on-white "decline" button that looks like a link is
probably annoying for young and able-bodied users but it may be a serious
obstacle for the others.

------
simion314
An issue I hit yesterday, I installed Chromium and I went in the Settings to
disable the Google auto login, it did not work for me and I was very
frustrated. After a few attempts I noticed that when you change the setting a
small notification appears on the lower corner of the screen that I need to
restart the program. Maybe that kind of notification is cool and slick (I
don't think it is) but it is easy to miss for people like me with mad eyes
(not sure if normal eyes can catch the notification if you are focusing on
other corner of the screen)

------
mrhappyunhappy
I’m 33, my car had a touch screen display and the Bluetooth sync function is 3
clicks deep. If I were to start driving right away, it becomes a huge hassle
to try to sync to Bluetooth. Doesn’t help that you can access the first 2
screens but the 3rd is locked since I’m driving. It’s as if some engineer
somewhere thought the 3rd screen is more distracting than the first 2. I
always imagine how easy it would be to have a physical button I can just click
any time. Ahh the days of modern design... gotta love it.

------
mark_l_watson
I like his criticism of difficulty in iPhone screen navigation, My Dad is 97
and has to carry a tiny pointing device to get full use from his phone. He is
much better using his iPad, but neither small device is natural for him like
using his Mac Desktop Pro or his iMac. When using his computers, the full size
keyboards and wireless mice work really well for him. Norman’s suggestions for
iPhone navigation would help my Dad a lot.

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erkose
Case in point. This article does not display when cookies are disabled.

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imgabe
> Even worse, when a film shows someone speaking in a foreign language, the
> film often translates the words, but so too does the closed captioning, and
> the two are placed on top of one another, making both attempts to help the
> viewer completely unhelpful.

This drives me nuts. Especially when the closed captioning blocks the film's
translation with something completely unhelpful like _(speaking foreign
language)_ Why even bother putting that in there?

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black6
> As a result, even a manual is not enough: all the arbitrary gestures that
> control tablets, phones, and computers have to be memorized. Everything has
> to be memorized.

 _If_ they’re documented at all. I only discovered the difference in iOS
between a “long press” and “hard press” on the touchscreen by accident. The
extra useability thrilled me, but I wish the feature were better documented.

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codedokode
Hacker News has room for improving too. While I have normal eyesight, I have
to zoom up this page because the letters are too small.

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crehn
I'm hoping one of the big tech companies will invest into creating an
inclusive design language that is accessible, functional and sexy from the
get-go.

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sadness2
If you succeed in creating technology that will change the world, you will
then have to live in said changed world as an old person.

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nikanj
Ironically the usability blog pops countless cookie consent dialogs to
distract the reader

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torstenvl
Irony is my favorite form of humor. This is how the article shows up for me:

[https://ibb.co/6XqtQGs](https://ibb.co/6XqtQGs)

~~~
js2
That’s horrible. Let me recommend 1BlockerX:

[https://ibb.co/yNQ4T08](https://ibb.co/yNQ4T08)

Or use Safari reader mode. Or both.

~~~
recursive
Using an add-on to get a usable experience is nearly the same as admitting
defeat.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's also a necessity.

Beyond uBlock Origin for the abusive parts, I've also recently started to use
Stylus to fix bad design of sites I visit frequently. Few minutes with
browser's Inspector and I can usually whip up a little bit of CSS that removes
unnecessary whitespace, UI trinkets, and densifies the site by factor of 2 to
5.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've been doing that Stylus thing for years.

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a3n
Well, they're _old_. They're difficult and boring to talk to. Besides, they
aren't going to buy enough of our stuff now or in the future. They aren't the
long-term loyal customers we're trying to cultivate, because they're - ahem -
_old_.

