vehicle/transportation technology-services

The tech user experience for all ages is mostly depressing.  A few delighters here and there break up a constant struggle to produce the right command, find the right part of the right website, and overcome the insanity of bug-fixing updates after updates.  And that is if you are well-trained and proficient.  Whether it is a phone, a tablet, or a much-needed website, we curse and complain – and then there’s another software update and a new set of complaints. We struggle with appliance and car interfaces, trying to understand the rationale for buttons and screens that are cluttered with too much information. Stay tuned for the May, 2024 report about these user experiences and what can be done to improve them.   The April blogs:

The frustration of the user experience. February was short but busy – but a topic emerged on the last day of January that is beginning to take shape in the form of interviews and insights from others.  All agree that the user experience, whether it is a car, a microwave, Google Gemini or a smartphone is deteriorating, possibly due to nearly-endless but not necessarily useful ‘innovation’ from developers.  Whether it is the ‘cockpit’ of a car that may now have three screens, an authentication process on a website that requires another device, or an app that expects a password that has not been used in the past five years.  Here are the blog posts:

User experience non-design – it’s not just tech devices – consider the stove’s cockpit.’  Studying the screen plus button choices on a new Microwave, one wonders who tested this interface?  Did they really think that the combinations were self-explanatory and intuitive?   Or is the convention of poor design so inherent in microwave, oven, and washing machine interfaces, that a ‘cockpit’ design is expected (both by the vendor and the user).   Of course, a cockpit is an appropriate term – imagine a pilot sitting down in the left seat of an airplane with zero training on what to touch first.

You saw and considered the 2022 Tech Trends. Each of these changes will make a difference for older adults and those who serve them. Consider what’s happened with over the counter hearing aids, now available in kiosks at retailers like Walmart and Rite Aid. Note that falls can be detected in a home without a wearable – via a wall-mounted device or through in-home Wi-Fi.

In recent years, TV Remote control devices became more usable – except for Apple’s.  Rant on. Starting with the older one (“Ridiculously symmetrical and highly unusable”) to the most recent Siri remote – where they give up on usable buttons and enable changing the channel by voice. You gotta love a company with a device so devoid of buttons – and so easily off the rails with an accidental touch.  No wonder it makes more sense to talk to it. Meanwhile, many usable TV remote control devices are in the market, including an Apple TV button remote from Function101 and you can also get a button universal remote control – and even one that is back-lit – so you can see the buttons – crazy!  Why are these devices called senior remotes?  Duh, because they have buttons, which seniors, maybe tired of all the accidentally swiping and zooming they do with their smartphones, just seem comforting and accessible.

CES 2022 – smaller in size, but big in tech futures.   Many big companies decided at the last minute to stay home, eliminating, as one attendee noted, the lines at Starbucks.  But this very-global show went on anyway, this time with 40,000 in person (down from 171,000 just two years ago.) AARP Innovation Labs, CTA Foundation accessibility awards, and numerous other in-person, remote, and hybrid sub-events went on (sort of) as scheduled. As with prior CES events, multiple new technologies that benefit older adults were showcased from around the world.  Some will appear in the US market, others may not until a much later date, if ever. All text is from public media. All are worth a look.