Some things that stop her in her tracks:

- any control that requires a touch to activate and then disappears on a timeout - like all the controls for video apps. She takes 3-4 seconds to realize something changed and then 5 more more to start orienting herself. The controls usually disappear within 5-7 seconds.

- any surprising prompt from the os throws her into helplessness and panic - updates that need a restart, etc.

- anything that switches the focus away from the current activity. Why would android interrupt a live call with some BS, ever, is beyond me.

- communications apps show a screen with names but that's often the log of past calls or a chat. She wants to just click a name and make a call. On zoom, going to her contacts required 2 or 3 clicks which were not intuitive for her, and so she can never initiate a call.

- zoom audio needed active confirmation to connect to audio. On a tablet, where no options are available but the over-wifi audio.

- her having to slide a control in order to answer a call.

- anything that requires a reaction within 10-15 seconds

- anything that uses (even widely accepted) technical jargon.

She is not deaf or disabled nor visually impaired and yet the complexity of using this device presents serious obstacles.

These are just from the top of my head. She doesn't browse or use a computer and I'm happy for her. TV and newspaper are enough and I just don't feel good about having her navigate a world of malicious predatory dark patterns.

This makes me realize how used I am to not trusting anything online and presuming the worst by default - in order to protect myself.

I remember how about a decade ago my dad wanted me to help him with an important email. Someone had emailed him to tell him he won a lottery in Britain. It took me a lot of effort to explain to him that it is a scam, that they've emailed everyone, automatically, (to him a simple email takes half an hour so he can't imagine so much effort going into a scam) and that despite them knowing his name... they don't really know him.

The asymmetrical nature of malicious activity online is so... dishartening.

She uses an iPad, but progressively Apple has complicated the interface to fit in more and more features, which has made it harder and harder for her to use the device simply.

---

One recent example is the Notes app, which today includes folders, tags, and many other fancy features. I only discovered recently that she had still been using the app as though she did the day she started using Notes, which must've been c. iOS 6. She didn't even notice the top-left "< Folders" button.

Apple's design language is "Clean" and "Modern", but often fails to convey to non-technical users that a even a button is...a button, since iOS/iPadOS use colored text with no background to convey that something is a button.

---

One other example was a mistake I made while configuring a web browser for her. I absent-mindedly turned on "Hide panels automatically", and it wasn't until I figured out what my mother meant when she complained "SOMETHING POPS OUT AND THEN JUST VANISHES" of what I had done wrong.

Then Apple changed the UI a little bit. I can't begin to explain it to her over the phone in my second language, because for starters, I don't have a non-updated device to be able to compare and find the exact difference. I felt a bit of a jar and was able to roll with it, but couldn't tell you what the difference is exactly.

LTS (guaranteed non-change for existing features, at the cost of possibly not getting all new features) for UI would be amazing.

And do not get me started on the drama involved in an iOS major version update and the requisite iCloud password entry to even start the phone. She has the password written down, but since it's helpfully hidden as she types, she can't see that she was a letter off or missed a shift. I ended up sending her to the Vodafone corporate store with her password and 3 reset answers to have one of them type it in for her, as we're on the other side of the country, and she kind of needed to be able to make and take phone calls.

I just got a new Android phone that iterated 1 version in the operating system and product. The old phone had a persistent triangle symbol to press for "back". Now that symbol is gone and I'm supposed to swipe from the edge of the screen for the same "back" function. Except, lots of apps use a similar motion for other functions, including Firefox for closing tabs. So, now I'm constantly swiping a few milimeters too close to the screen edge and going "back" when I want to close a tab, with few clear visual clues as to what is going wrong. This is just 1 of many UI fails on the new phone, very frustrating for me and I would guess extremely and unnecessarily confusing for "normal" people.

I suppose outdated features like good grip and removable battery are a bit much to ask for.

People don't have time to dig into usability details, instead they get an app because it gives a nice looking first impression? Could "rewards" in a company work in similar ways -- impressing managers with sth nice looking?

On multiple occasions when explaining computer stuff, I explicitely said something like "don't write anything down, but try to understand the metaphor", because the software is a moving target. I've been also asked about "a manual for this computer", when they actually wanted a printed manual that explains all the software on the computer.

Modern day electronics aren't really made for most people who are born before about 1960. Understanding all metaphors intuitively probably requires having been exposed early in life.

If someone had to design a process to mock and torture the elderly trying to use modern devices, that's the one. Along with messages that time out and unexpected events that steal focus.

As I understand it, imagery is (ideally supposed to be) language agnostic, like the "icons" for events at the Olympics, though it doesn't always work out as intended.

Somehow this has all gone wrong through: no text so the first time you use it you've no idea what the icons mean, they are all the same color and pretty much the same shape so you don't even get the speed of recognition.

The UI on most mobile devices are terrible in one way or another. There are zero discoverability, things will hide, lock, block or disappear with no clear way of getting back.

Often I feel it’s easier to go to the computer. As an example: I cannot use the banking app on the phone anymore. In an attempt to make it easier to use, they hid/removed the features I used, such as “how much is in my account right now?” or “pay a bill”. That stuff is now hidden in a complex menu system. I can manage the MasterCard I don’t have though.

Designing good UI is an incredible skill, one that few people gave, and one even fewer are willing to pay for.

I don't think it's even just that. If any of these companies did usability tests they'd discover quickly enough that their designs don't work. I guess they just don't bother.

I have worked in software development since the mid 90s, often freelance so I've probably been at 20-30 companies in total. All of these companies produced software that had some sort of UI. I think only a single time was any usability testing done, i.e. get a normal person sat in front of the software and get them to perform a task and see if they can figure it out on their own. Normally the process is that the designer asserts that this particular way is best, and that's the way it gets implemented and that's what the customer gets to use.

Part of the problem imo is that everyone thinks "how hard can it be?" and that they have good ideas for UI design. They therefore aren't interested in reading Cooper or submitting their brainwaves to even peer scrutiny.

What does that mean? (Not a native speaker)

Don't Make Me Think is another good book I think :-)

So either the design team is ignoring 20 plus years of research or they just don’t know what they are doing.

My go to design manifesto is making any screen idiot proof. Mistakes can always be made, but you can safely back out from it and you always understand the consequences (aka you learn)

The design team has been ignoring Apple’s own HCI guidelines for years now

Guidelines for thee, but not for me, I guess.

The question is should there be a middle ground between keeping the product trivially simple, or cramming an increasing amount of features to satisfy power users. Either extreme works well for a specific subset of Apple's user base; a middle ground is more prone to leaving everybody confused and/or unsatisfied.

I have zero UI design experience so can't really chime in. Maybe a toggle option inside a menu that swaps app modes? Leave it off and you have a very basic Notes app; toggle it and you get all the bells and whistles, tags, folders, parsing... But this totally causes the problem you describe in your last paragraph.

Many UIs today are objectively bad and unintuitive (like the Gmail example in the article). UIs should always strive to eliminate the "don't know what you don't know" quadrant: common sense should be enough to navigate the system safely. Perfect examples are the Gmail example in the article, or the "hanging up the phone doesn't hang up the phone" problem of landlines[0] where you can do "everything right" and still get scammed. The judgment metric here is whether a decently intelligent people could fall victims to these; they can, so they're objectively bad UIs. They violate common sense.

Then there's another group, that severely struggles with computing abstractions. (These can be perfectly smart people in other areas). They can have slightly degraded motor skills and end up swiping or tapping inadvertently and getting lost. The kind of people that thinks a locked phone is "turned off". That get confused when Control Center or Notification Center show up, because the swipe was inadvertent and they don't understand the abstraction ("where did my video go?").

It is utterly impossible to design the same UI for this group of people and for everyone else. For them, you'd ideally permanently dedicate a fifth of the screen to a never-changing menu, with common operations (copy, paste, switch app, see notifications, check email, find app). For most people, menu bars would be terrible on phones and tablets since they'd need to be always visible, and big enough to be tappable, and would waste collosal screen space; but some people would prefer that.

The UI would need to have a permanent banner that explicitly labels the UI context, essentially a "permanent tutorial mode" that explains computing abstractions, for example with a banner that says "YOU ARE CURRENTLY VIEWING RECENT NOTIFICATIONS. [GO BACK]" (otherwise, you get inadvertent swipes, and "hey, where'd my video go!").

Designing "one UI for everybody" is hopeless. This is an obvious accessibility issue; and I don't understand why no company is building optional "tutorial modes" into their UIs since I'd assume the amount of people struggling with computers is a lot higher than the amount of blind or paralyzed people.

[0]: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/beware-of-the-delayed-disconnect-phone...

I'm an experienced developer in the software industry and some of the stuff you mention still catches me off-guard --- especially the whole "disappearing controls" thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

In my opinion, it's practically an insult to provide software or a "service" that essentially demands the person interacting with it slog through countless arcane or obtuse interfaces which could have been totally simple, concise and straightforward. There have been literal decades of prior art on subtly nudging a user through the most obvious and "least surprising" ways to complete their intended task.

No ads (just checked with an adblocker turned off), and the same link always dumps you in the same always-active room. As a bonus the whole thing is open source.

No, I don't work for them or have any interest whatsoever other than being a happy user.

Finally I used a little relay board connected to a couple of GPIO pins on the Pi and programmed that to turn off and on the Pi. The relay board was remote controlled (infrared, worked fine). I used a small, but not too small, remote control with one single big red button. When a scheduled or agreed (maybe by a phone call) meeting was due, my father pressed the button and the TV switched to the Pi HDMI (turning on the TV if it wasn't already on), showing the Jitsi room. With maybe grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and my parents could just sit in their chairs and watch and talk via the TV. When finished my father pressed the button again, and I had programmed the Pi, as part of its shutdown sequence, to switch the TV to the other, normal HDMI port. It's possible to command the TV to switch inputs, via commands to HDMI, unfortunately it's not possible to switch to antenna input but my parents were on cable and used an HDMI port for that. So with this setup they would go from the Jitsi room to whatever they were watching before. Though the TV would be left on even if it was off before they connected - I didn't find a way to control the TV that detailed.

This worked well, as far as it went, the issue I had was that it wasn't practically possible to set up a power supply for that little relay board so I used a couple of 9V batteries instead. But it turned out that the board would suck the batteries empty in no time. So, as a prototype, it worked, but I would have to make a proper power supply for that to be fully useful. After a few months my parents had to move to a care home so the project was put on a shelf.

Even as a software delveloper, I would be delighted to use that, for the elegance of the concept and not having to dig through menues, toolbars and whatever else.

I don't know if it's just me, but even as an "IT person", I never understood this "connect to audio" phrase, I just learnt that it is required for calls...

If it's a private meeting, you're going to listen only, but

you're at a public place and didn't yet plug in your headphones?

It is annoying they ask it every time but there is, in fact, a different option: option to call your phone (which most people have) which could have lower latency and higher reliability. I have succesfully used it in places where internet is spotty but adding an extra step to join a call is too much.

Also Zoom on PC is usable, Zoom on phones is awful

But for minor stuff/fixes it's easy to slip something that's awkward or not very usable.

Or a legacy interface is still being used (because the developer thought it out - since the company was smaller, or a specific screen was overlooked) and that's not a great interface

All using the same old over dubbed Musk videos from years ago to sell me trading software which they could easily detect with their own Content ID but they choose not to.