Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.
It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.
I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.
It makes me so angry.
So. Angry.
1. It costs willingness and money to do so.
2. Tech is saturated with complexity bias.
3. Let’s face it. Most companies and management are “superior” to users; little Musks and Thiels, just with less power to make people feel inferior. It’s the Curtis Yarvin syndrome, and it’s getting worse, not better.
AI “could” help but AFAICT, general purpose AI, without the guardrails that Thiel and Musks paid boatloads of money to prevent, is just plain dangerous. Witness suicides and more.
I’m 77 and tech was my entire career. I keep up daily via HN. And MY gripe is that I KNOW what’s going on, and how to make it better, at least conceptually, and I see it getting worse. One of my “funnest” little projects was writing up a little app (in Hypercard) for a division director who didn’t know computers from a ham sandwich, and it was just right.
So, when will people
1. Give a damn and spend money to make things usable?
2. Invite “real people” into design discussions?
3. Try to keep things simple?
4. Have a heart instead of a “supremacy” complex?
You’re on your laptop, now go to your phone, find your banking app, enter your PIN code (no not the same one as your ATM card), find the tiny grey scanner icon, scan the QR code on the screen of your laptop, press confirm. Now put down the phone and switch back to the laptop.
Fails 100% of the time.
The Netherlands has a centralized system for signing into all government related web sites. It’s especially egregious. You want to log in? Do NOT press the Login button, press the one saying “connection code”. For “first world” countries that should have no problem understanding the concept of an aging population it should be a criminal offense to roll out this kind of “solution”.
I wonder how we got so low from standing on the giants shoulders in the early days (I still miss my Sony Clie Palm OS organizer as being superior in its main goal organizing than any ios app I've tried after that).
Were we working for too long inside our comfy IT bubble echo chamber?
Or is it just a general quality problem and 2% law? With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area (there is not much opportunities for innovation there to hype and inflate your CV with).
Now she's supposed to open her email while keeping the web page open. It took 5 minutes to do that, find the email, copy down the code, close the email ...
Web site has timed out.
Just one of many examples.
At this point, I truly fear that if we don't inject more humanity into the tech sector, ya know, kindness, empathy, appreciation for those in an increasingly degraded cognitive state; we're definitely building ourselves a hell we 100% deserve for the hubris on display.