What was bad is worse – and the tech firms pay little attention. This article advocates for technology caregiving -- helping aging parents with technology that is too difficult to navigate – like finding ‘Pay Bill’ button that moved or locating a discount coupon. Or forcing the elderly to use a QR code to read a concert program or study a restaurant menu. An airport Chili’s restaurant dropped paper menus a few years ago. Maybe they did it to save the planet. But many of the people who are in that airport are elderly – and they don’t know what’s for lunch until they train themselves to aim their cameras at the reprehensible and confusing QR code menu. Or they must plan ahead and read the online menu before they show up. Really?
The failure of user interfaces is not a temporary condition and there is no one-time fix. Waiting for the next wave of baby boomers to be more tech-literate than the oldest is a fool’s hope. They are not the problem. The tech interfaces, including or especially in cars, continue to change, uh, improve. Finding the button becomes nearly impossible, even for those who know where to look. And read this rant to know that usability expertise has become irrelevant to tech designers. This also includes TVs, home appliances,and of course, cars. Renting a very nice Audi Q7 recently, we wanted to change the radio station – studying all the mostly meaningless symbols on the screen did not help – and so we finally opened the glove box and read the manual.
Samsung saw this years ago – and created Easy Mode for their smartphones. Apple danced around the problem, but eventually produced Assistive Access, targeting those with 'cognitive and developmental disabilities.' Nice messaging for the older adult that struggles with Apple’s perpetual upgrades and its semi-comprehensible Settings menu. Where Accessibility is its own (useful) category separate from Display & Brightness. Okay.
This is not an age-related issue. The idea that ‘technology caregiving’ is required for elderly relatives has something of a ring now. But if tech change is actually constant and often gratuitous (can you say Bug Fixes?), the WP author one day will wake up after another silly upgrade and be baffled. He will have become ‘them’ and find himself searching for help. (Or as a 6-year-old in our family complained one day – “They moved the button!”) Maybe he will ask Grok or ChatGPT that have absorbed the entirety of the Internet, including the user manuals, and walk him through the latest version. (By the way, you can do that now.)
