Sounds more like a browser than a website. E.g., like a screen reader. And/or add a service part of it, where filters aid in delivering the content more cleanly. Actually it sounds like Instapaper. I would start there.
I recently watched a 65 year old woman use an iPad for the first time. One thing I noticed right away about her interaction was she struggled to realize that many blue text words were actually buttons (see the Send button in this screenshot[0]). IMO, this has been one of the biggest design failures of recent Apple software.
I definitely agree that the UI of buttons in iOS is broken now. The blue is only a useful hint if you are 1) a long-time web user, and 2) not color-blind.
I'm an Android user since v2 and have watched it become so much less usable over time. The average person has no idea what is clickable and what is not in v5. This causes fear and confusion. My wife (aged 30 and intelligent) cannot reliably send SMSs on her Nexus 5.
I haven't used v5 so I cannot comment on that transition. However I was around for the transition from v3 to v4 and I'm pretty sure the common sentiment was it was strides more usable. Also, without malice, I find it pretty shocking your wife cannot reliably send an SMS.
IMO, Android 4 was the pinnacle of stability and usability in their lineage. I had a Moto X and 2012 Nexus 7. The upgrade to Android 5 on my Nexus was saddening; it was different for the sake of being different, and it fixed problems that didn't exist (and introduced many new ones).
Even 4.1 was much better than 4.4 - all the migration from text and contoured buttons to symbols. an open eye for "turn off snooze" on the alarm is indicative of what I think is really poor design.
Agreed, I loved the old iPhone 3 UI, since then, it has gone to hell. Android is also in that hell, with the "Flat UI", and my brain hurts trying to find what's clickable.
>> Agreed, I loved the old iPhone 3 UI, since then, it has gone to hell. Android is also in that hell, with the "Flat UI", and my brain hurts trying to find what's clickable.
The whole point of going with raised buttons and such was to provide a visual cue as to what was clickable. It seems UI people who missed the early 90's are getting to relearn this lesson. When I saw flat I just shook my head.
It really seems to go in cycles. We've gone from flat UIs (think ncurses-based) to using texture and shadow (90's - mid 2000s), and now all the way back to flat again.
I'll never understand why these designer types think that discarding all of that context is a good thing.
It happens in all areas of everything. I'm convinced. It comes in cycles, because of generational retirements/career transitions. Younger/newer folks don't have the experience to know what the older/more experienced folks do. The older/more experienced folks do a bad job of documenting their experiences for the next group.
I'm thoroughly convinced I'm correct, but have no data to back it up.
We should do a head-to-head competition between two Grandmothers, one armed with an iPad2 using iOs6 and another one using iOs8 and let them do the same tasks, and measure the time it takes to do those tasks.
I agree 100%. But I also remember posts on different forums about how button shapes are a skeuomorphic anachronism that nobody needs anymore. So if Apple didn't address that audience, they'd still be screaming about Apple's backwards design.
I've been looking for a particular quote about this, and just found it. I thought it was a random forum poster, but it was actually John Gruber from Daring Fireball:
"The design of the iPhone software was entirely informed by the fact that this was a new experience, it was nothing like using an existing smartphone, nor anything like using a Mac or Windows PC. It needed training wheels to get people up to speed. Thus, to name one small example, why iOS buttons have tended to look so very button-y. To inform the user, as clearly as possible, that this is a button that can be tapped.
Look around you. Any street corner. Any office. Any shopping mall. Any restaurant. You will see people tapping on touchscreens. We all get it now. iOS-style computing is no longer novel; it is now the standard interaction model for personal computing.
The primary problem Apple faced with the iPhone in 2007 was building familiarity with a new way of using computers. That problem has now been solved. It is time to solve new problems."
I remember a few years ago here there were lots of front page posts criticism skeumorphism, and commentors criticized it as well. Flat design was all the rage.
This is one of my pet peeves -- designers hate styling links so they're underlined, but the underline provides a valuable UI cue to the user that the text is clickable/tappable/whatever. So stripping it out makes a site actively less usable.
(You can try to invent your own UI cue to take the place of the underline, of course, but then the user has to learn a new cue for each separate site, whereas the underline is still common enough for people to have already learned it somewhere else.)
Stackoverflow was one of the biggest offenders to me. They would state that something was a duplicate of something else, with no link to the other thing. Except there was a link. I just couldn't find it without 'view source.'
I must confess I've been guilty of it too. I 'invented' a style of link whereby the link has a border on all four sides and is filled with a transparent pastel. I've even seen this around some (apparently it is kind of an obvious idea). But all in all, I've gotten away from trying to invent my own UI.
At work they introduced a page once with links that were not only not underlined but also the same color as the regular text. I sent them a hoary old Nielsen article or two describing why that's a bad idea and people don't want to play Minesweeper with text but they dismissed the article as "too old" and no longer relevant to today's tech-savvy users. Then they had to change it within a couple weeks because no one could find the links.
"We're going to make a door that's perfectly flat and seamless, and we're going to paint it white just like the walls. It's going to be the most awesome door ever and people will love using it."
If web designers could actually stop and think about the virtual things they do in physical terms they might be able to see how foolish they're being, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
The backlash against skeuomorphism has really led to some serious regression in design affordances. In a similar vein, there are text inputs in the latest OS X that are indistinguishable from labels. I'm not anti-fad but these are real usability issues.
Apparently the relevant design/usability term is "affordances", which are the "sensory characteristics [of an object that] intuitively imply its functionality and use"[1]. Affordances in UI design have evidently gone out of style, which effectively means that people are just expected to learn the arbitrary (and ever-changing) rules of how to interacting with computers (and other computing devices), instead of having the computing devices cater to how people expect them to work.
I think this also leads back to the idea that the touchscreen as a user interface is absolutely awful in every way except for the one huge advantage of its reconfigurability. (I forget the source for this, but there's a specific article I'm thinking of.)
What kills me is how car radios are getting touchscreens now. What good is a touchscreen in a car radio? The whole beauty of the traditional design is you can operate it without taking your eyes off the road.
Go through the products available at a site like sparkfun or adafruit and tell me you couldn't make some awesome customization control panel system? Larger buttons for smartphone-specific functions, some with their own small (and low-cost) discrete display perhaps?
A modular control system, featuring 100% plug and play elements (knobs, sliders, mini-displays, buttons) mountable in a range of simple chassis (19"rack, keyboard size, mini desktop box, mixing-console-size control center) that can be configured by a trivial to use piece of software and thereafter control any device (PC, tablet).
I've been wanting this for twenty-five years.
There are things that do some of this, but not very well, and not very cost-effectively. There is software that simulates this on a touchscreen (grr). Anyone fancy a hardware startup?
I realize this probably isn't quite what you want, but have you looked at using MIDI? A lot of modern MIDI gear is quite cheap, connects to your computer over USB, and with the appropriate software can be used to control anything on your computer. There are MIDI devices with just about any kind of physical input you could want - pots, sliders, pedals, buttons, pressure-sensitive pads, optical and sound-based inputs, and much more.
There are a variety of development boards (Livid Brain, uCApps MIDIbox) designed to allow semi-technical users to build their own MIDI controllers. It's also reasonably straightforward to configure an Arduino Micro or a Teensy to work as a USB HID interface. If you can use a soldering iron and a drill, you can build a custom controller.
Absolutely. I've been known to break out the breadboard to that end. But soldering irons and arduinos are a level of too much... erm... wires, for what I'm thinking. Not to mention that making it control what you want takes time and debugging and perhaps a sympathetic operating system or app.
How about forgetting the electronics, and seeing controllers as just another UI problem. Software, implemented in plastic.
What would you want to build if it were that easy? Custom controllers for games? Custom games? MIDI Instruments? Dashboards with physical elements? Home / media center controls? POS interfaces? Hardware usability testing prototypes? Kitchen gadgets?
Maybe I'd be the only market, but I think it would be a big blurring of the line between hacker and maker culture.
I am one of the fools who bought an optimus popularis - it's optimus lame.
Also those relegendable knobs and sliders are very popular in the music industry already 0 - so it would be fairly trivial to bring it to a consumer device.
I had a 2012 jetta that had this. It was complete touchscreen with only a couple basic function buttons. I found it extremely annoying to use. To make matters worse, when the flimsy screen got a tiny crack in it, I lost all control of the radio because I could no longer touch to interact with it. I guess that would be a big deal breaker from me if I had means to be in the market for a tesla. I'm not big on having everything in a touchscreen.
The lexus I recently purchased uses a mouse essentially to interact with the screen which I find pleasant to use and also offers a full range of buttons for the radio and climate control. I find this to be a much better experience for myself.
Still, the 'mouse' seems like a poor choice. As the op said - isn't the idea of big dumb buttons that we don't have to take our attention off the road to interact with them?
Aren't most affordances just arbitrary rules that most people can be expected to already know? I'm not sure that an adult introduced to computers for the first time in their live would figure out convex-looking buttons much faster.
Affordances aren't arbitrary. The idea behind affordances is that the tool fits the user, not the other way around. If something is meant to be gripped in a person's hand, then it should be the right size and shape for a hand to grip it. Conversely, if something is the right size and shape to grip in a hand, that intuitively suggests that it is for gripping.
True, but affordances on screen are a different story. There's nothing to grip there. There are just pixels on a flat surface, that may or may not simulate a 3D effect. And you operate them using a mouse, which itself is a layer of indirection. So I don't buy the concept that affordances in software are not arbitrary - they don't refer to somewhat fundamental concepts for human (like grabbing), they refer to the last 100 or so years, when physical buttons became a common element of the environment one lives in.
I see learning UI in computers as a process that begins with a new user having basic UI concepts explained to him, and then just following the changing trends, where a new trend usually makes "affordances" refer to the previous trend.
Not touchscreen related but monitors used to have dials for brightness/contrast control. But now we have these pain in the butt multi-function buttons that you gotta use to pull up the OSD, scroll through a bunch of menus and then finally you can adjust a setting.
Same thing with volume controls, used to be dials now it's buttons. Maybe I just like dials.
When my daughter was two and a half she could use the iPad pretty efficiently, because it was always pretty obvious where you should click. At nearly four she now struggles to click things or to even know what to click. It's a terrible regression for a debatably minor improvement in overall appaearance.
I'm glad it's not just me. Somebody made one of my websites beautiful, but with 'flat' buttons. People became confused on how it worked, and I had to go back and give the buttons depth.
Huh, thanks - I found the option, and enabled it for her iPad. At a glance, nothing much changed, there are just too many flat button-like things throughout the UI for this to help, but we will see.
You don't have to be 65 to have that problem, at first I couldn't tell, flat UI isn't accessible in any way, is definitely a step backwards in accessibility.
Designers seem to hate data. At most they might do some brief user testing but they'll laugh you out of the room if you suggest AB testing their designs. They love the Henry Ford quote about people wanting faster horses because it justifies their dismisiveness of users. The regrettable thing about Apple's ascendancy is that businesses are letting designers run products unchecked while designers all imagine themselves as arrogant Steve Jobs type who's vision can't be questioned.
Apple seems to rely on long term user training sometimes. I knew that was a send button because I have used previous versions of iOS, it's never even occurred to me that it doesn't look like a button at all. Similarly, I was late to the iOS party, I joined around iOS4-ish, and there were features I discovered completely on accident. Like double clicking the home button on the lock screen to bring up audio controls. Great feature, but I had no idea it was there. People joining in the next few years probably won't know to swipe from the top or bottom until they do it by accident.
THIS! "What is clickable" is one of the first things the mind wonders when presented a new page. If the true answers aren't obvious in 0.3 seconds, it's a bad design.
The latest UI trends to remove "button style" and go to "flat" and just text is a prime example of how we've gone the wrong direction.
Been there. Large bookmarks with mobile website versions. Adblock proxy on wifi router (even /etc/hosts blocking could do). Advanced version is GreaseMonkey with some scripts/styles to customize often used websites.
The BBC News mobile app is a good example. Each article is predictably laid out. There are no ads. Nothing happens if you accidentally click the photos while scrolling. Give it a try!
I've used it as my main source of getting news from back home. Ignoring the quality of the editing (I spot a spelling or obvious grammar mistake almost daily), the app is decent.
It's straightforward. I can pick the categories I want. It just gives you the top X articles per category, nothing more. Doesn't link you elsewhere. One headline, one thumbnail image, sometimes 1 image embedded in the article. There's are very few buttons to be confused by. One of them is font size. I'd say it's pretty grandma-friendly!
This was true until the recent update - now there are massive great images and you have to scroll around an infinite canvas-style arrangement before you can even find the article you're looking for. Fails the grandma test immediately.
Somehow that whole description reminded me on the Drudge Report approach to design. Just super clear, easy and functional and forgetting about anything else.
If you want to avoid most of this, use news sources that don't need ads to operate. That means NPR, BBC, CBC, and similar.
I use the NPR news app on my phone, and rarely encounter an ad. Nice benefit is that most of the stories have narrated audio if she wants to switch modes.
Major market NPR affiliate developer here. We need ads (digital) and underwriting (OTA) to operate. Member donations are great but don't make up the entire budget.
Still, it's at least not a news source purpose built to drive ad revenue. The culture and mission is different, and it shows in the interface design.
If you're in a position to suggest, let people donate to NPR to get a version of the app that never shows ads as their reward.
I noticed mine recently started very occasionally showing ads down on the bottom, but surely the ad revenue from delivering them to a single person is smaller than the amount a typical NPR listener will donate (if they donate at all).
Unfortunately the government continues to the cut funding for the CBC.
And the CBC doesn't help its public perception (who have the power to advocate for increased funding) when they give leeway to their stars like Jian Ghomeshi and Amanda Lang that would be unacceptable in other companies.
And it's even considering selling it's Toronto HQ amid staff reductions and budget cuts.
My point? Enjoy CBC while it lasts. Because in a decade or so, it may not even close to comparable to the likes of NPR, BBC, et al.
If you're not in the UK, BBC news has ads mid-article in a lot of their articles. I use the site several times a day and some of the ads are that awkward height where you have to scroll carefully past it to avoid clicking.
I'm barely a third of Betty's age, and I have the same problems browsing the web on mobile devices.
I click on things by accident, I have trouble scrolling on some websites, sometimes the text is too small and crammed into a column that is too small for it, pop-ups and strange noises happen constantly.
I too would like it if more web documents were available as simply formatted blocks of text and pictures, with links that I didn't accidentally click constantly.
Reading about the new macbook, and its pressure sensitive touch pad, and the pressure sensitive keyboard cover Microsoft sells for their Surface range, makes me wonder if something similar would be possible for screens.
Yep, it is something of a throwback to resistive screens. But with resistives at least there was a distinction between resting the finger on the screen, and interacting with a on-screen object.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I've noticed with older folks that it becomes more difficult to apply granular amounts of pressure to objects (especially if you have a motor control disorder like Parkinson's). I don't believe pressure sensitive touch pads would help in this regard.
Well it does not have to be using all tiers, just that you have to make it deliberate. the details has to be worked out, and likely you can't make one size fit all given the wide range of age related issues.
This is true, but I'm not sure it's relevant in this case. AFAIK old people generally have more trouble controlling how far they push things, but the only distinction we're interested in here is whether they're pushing or merely resting their hand.
This still wouldn't be enough for people with diseases that cause major tremors, but I'd imagine it's enough for people who have lost fine motor control, because we're only trying to distinguish pushing from not-pushing.
Nope. The older you get the less mechanoreceptors are left in your skin. This has 2 effects then: You actually do feel less pressure or vibration from touching something and You can't control your fingers as well because the feedback system has less input for fine motor control into the cerebellum. You cannot feel nor control as well.
Additionally, human touch sensation is incredibly good in the fingers, hypothesized to be related to our use of tools. That we can at all use such a touch screen is a miracle in the animal kingdom. Replacing this is not possible at this point in time as we age. However, larger and more clear buttons will help, along with a training period and good motivation for the person. As we age, we need to have the motivation to access the world and the opportunity to do so. The future requires all participants of every age.
Excuse the pun, but HOLY BANANAS! That is amazing! Thank you for that vid and the info. That is so cool! I had no idea the chimp could be trained like that. Amazing! Thank you!
MS didn't carry the Touch Cover through to the SP3, so it's down to just the mechanical keyboard now. Too much of a learning curve maybe? I only ever tried it out in Best Buy, but I couldn't type on them.
My parents go out of their way to install iPhone apps on their iPad. With retina assets (and the fact they still have non-retina screens), it's not crufty looking anymore.
Problem is many apps have universal binaries now so you can't force the lower-res (larger touch target) UIs.
I think the biggest problem I have is clicking or the wrong link because some banner thing finally loaded at the top of the page and pushed everything down. (I don't have great internet at home.) It drives me crazy, because then I have to back up and wait for the page to reload again.
Another tip for helping people with slow internet: don't break your article into multiple pages! I think the primary reason for doing this to get more ad traffic, but I promise I will leave when I see that your list of ten items is separated into ten pages.
I feel the same way, it feels very deliberate the way the ad loads just enough to shift a call to action I to an accidental ad click. It cannot think of a solution to resolve this type of blackhat trickery.
The simplest solution might be to use the "Reader view available" button at the top left of the iPad / iPhone. It tends to show just the text and relevant images when it works well.
This is the only way I find it possible to visit news websites anymore. Otherwise they are all filled with banners and popups. If the article isn't available in reader view I click back and don't bother with it.
Accidentally clicking a link wouldn't be a problem if you got the chance to back out early once you realized you'd touched it. For example, touch and hold might work. You press on the link, and it starts visually zooming into the link to alert you. If you keep pressing for half a second, it takes you to that page. If you let go, it zooms back out - no harm done. If you drag, it zooms back out and scrolls.
Agree. I think the mobile world is facing a very hard problem: how to show meaningful and relatively large amount of content in an elegant way on a 5" screen. Squeezing the content of a 13" laptop screen into a 5" phone screen just screw it up, even if the phone has a larger resolution. On the other hand, if I have to keep scrolling to see just a single sentence, then I'd rather give up.
I too would like it if more web documents were available
as simply formatted blocks of text and pictures, with
links that I didn't accidentally click constantly.
That's probably not going to happen. For my part I would be happy if I could recover quickly from an accidental click.
That would be a start.
Safari on iOS is my typical example: Click on link by accident, notice your mistake, go back to original page, Safari does a full reload. If you have no network you can't continue reading. Why can't Safari cache the page and allow quick navigation, like any desktop browser?
Better yet, you go back, and the same page refreshes, because it hijacked your back button. It's 2015 and this problem has still not been resolved in any of the major browsers on the market.
I realise that in those situations I just have to click fast twice, so that the second click takes place before scripts have been loaded - but I'm sure Betty does not know that.
On desktops a new "feature" is to continually spam "pop ups" whenever I highlight text. I am aware that not everyone repeatedly clicks/selects/de-selects as they read (I used to think I was the only one...) but with no way to turn that shit off I'm stuck. And on any new site where it is encountered I end up spend more time undoing accidental clicks on suddenly appearing windows than I do reading.
The FT is a good example, the site is unreadable for me. So I no longer visit it.
I feel your pain, and you are not the only one to do the weird select-then-scroll thing (it's also how i copy text into my clipboard). Does NoScript (for Firefox and friends only i believe) perhaps solve your gripes? I find the modern web unusable without NoScript and RequestPolicy installed (plus AdBlock Edge for good measure, but in principle just the first two should suffice).
This is a great point in that design for an older demographic is not actually about 'designing for an older demographic'. It's a call to go back to the principles of understanding intent and purpose. The end result is good design, not just good design for older adults.
What an amazing mini-case study here. Really good point regarding news and links. Generally in newspapers you don't read part of an article, move to another one, and then to another one similarly to how a hyperlinked article is laid out.
This is one of the main reasons Google is moving towards a focus on mobile usability. One of their biggest warnings I see site owners get slammed for is "links too close together" and this is a great example of that.
News blogs have started to out and out change the subject by putting a break in the article and then a "SEE ALSO:" link to a completely different story which may or may not be related but probably won't cause you to understand the current story any better. It's very distracting and is also very self-serving as they are just trying to get more page views out of you.
>Generally in newspapers you don't read part of an article, move to another one, and then to another one...
I actually do this more when reading a physical newspaper than reading newspapers online. With several articles laid out on the same physical page and articles jumping from one page to another mid-article, I read articles uninterrupted beginning to end much less frequently than when reading on the typical newspaper website. Or am I misunderstanding what you'er saying here?
A browser is the correct application to read the news, but all the mentioned issues are related to the spammy nature of news websites. If I redesigned their web layout, Betty would have no problem reading the news, especially if her browser has a setting to increase the default font size.
However, news companies would lose money and go out of business since heavy advertising is their business, but should an entity relying on borderline spam have any necessary reason to stay around?
Most software is still very complicated for older people. I recently helped my 90+ grandfather download a Word document attached to an email, edit the document, print a copy, and reply with the edited version attached. You would not believe how much prerequisite knowledge this takes for someone computer-illiterate.
I think there is a big hole in the market for software that is designed to be as easy as possible at the expense of power/flexibility. The article talks about people 75+, but I think the cutoff where a majority of people have a hard time with computers is younger than that. I bet that someone who really tried hard to make an integrated suite of senior-friendly software would do well.
Seeing as this thread is about software, I think the point might be that kids know they can't really break software, so they're more willing to experiment.
Informing my mom that she should just try stuff out on her Mac b/c she isn't going to break stuff was huge to help her get over her fear that she's going to click a wrong button and break something on a very expensive device.
[This doesn't address the issue of malware, of course, which is (in a sense) "breaking" your security by clicking a link]
Ah, I was indeed talking about software, and about people breaking things by accident.
I had the same issue with my mom, it became better when I told her that the computer will ask before doing something irreversal (and even then it might be fixable), and I will only help her after she thinks she broke it.
While I was happily taking apart the OS as a kid. The only thing that really broke was a game that switched to US layout after I checked it out in a hex editor. (The Sims, you can read the comments in the code, quite neat. :) )
Why does it have to affect only 89 year old people? This crap happens to me all the time and I'm 29. A page is loading slowly and I click what I think is the actual content, right as an add is being rendered.
Even worse is when an add overlays the entire page and I can't click around it. It's infuriating.
I'm the same age, and I have this problem too. Beautifully illustrated by the Guardian's website (sorry for Vine, it was the easiest\quickest way to share this with a friend when i made it): https://vine.co/v/hKOBYhVB2mH
True, though sometimes I do feel that a lot of people in there don't realize what they're really doing. It's a kind of a reality distortion field I see around marketers; some of them really seem to think that what they're doing is valuable for the consumer.
Well, it's their job to make those numbers go up. Which, yes, is in direct conflict with the best interest of their users. But when metrics are set and their livelihood depends on making people click ads more... there you go. The reality distortion field allows them to remain relevant in the eyes of management, as well as feeling a sense of purpose in their role.
It peeves me somewhat just how consistently people talking about design for people who are not tech savvy invoke older people and more often women than men. "So easy your grandma/mom could use it" does convey a lot of information but only because I know about the cultural sexism and ageism that is being employed to make the point.
And in this article I think their ageism lead to a logical failure: they say the number of old people is growing, as if people are losing their abilities as they age (which is of course true but not really relevant to "have you chosen to learn to use computers"). Amusingly, they similtaensously make this logical error and acknowledge it by saying eventually all old people will be digital natives... But in the meantime the population is growing.
And she was getting a bit frustrated and worried — that by clicking on something, she was going to install malware or not be able to return to her story.
This is how the news site makes their money and the reason why it's free to view the articles. Betty needs to purchase a subscription to view articles ad-free (if the sites she browses offer it)
Now Betty needs to "login" to her news site every time in order to disable the ads (not to mention pay, and renew service each term) I don't think that will improve the process, and it ad more steps with potentially confusing instruction to her process. Even if the site was able to store along term cookie for Betty, I doubt the sublt difference between versions would do much as there is typically a lot of other "junk" (around the article) that can distract the user.
It's even worse than that: not only does she need to login, she needs to remember a separate username and password for each site (which, good luck), or she needs to use a password manager. And if she uses a password manager, she needs to know how to select a usable/secure one, load her passwords into it, integrate it with her browser, sync it across all her devices, keep its contents secure... which, good luck.
In practice, of course, Betty will do neither of these things; she'll just use the same username and password everywhere. So then it's just a matter of time until a hack on one of the sites she visits opens her up to all kinds of new problems.
Username/password authentication is so, so utterly broken.
Agreed. OAuth isn't a whole lot better and has it's own cons. I have seen SQRL (https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm) but not being much of an encryption expert couldn't say how secure it is, and it doesn't seem to be gaining any adoption. But it is at least a novel approach.
News sites that offer paid subscriptions, in the main, still show ads to paying users, in much the same way that when you subscribe to a print newspaper or magazine it shows up with ads in it as well.
The reason is the same as in print: ad revenues generally bring in much more than subscriptions do. Here's some data for the newspaper business, for instance: http://ajr.org/2014/02/27/big-shift-reliance-reader-payments... You can see how even with the collapse of newspaper advertising over the last decade, ad revenue is still generally somewhere from 50-70% of overall revenue. So ad revenue is critical, even for subscription pubs.
This is even more true online, because if you make your publication ad-free for subscription users, you're cutting the ads off from the eyeballs the advertisers want most -- the eyeballs of engaged, frequent readers/viewers/whatever, since those are the very people who care enough to buy subscriptions. So doing so drives down the overall value of advertising in your publication.
Pretty much this. Paid placements in the article are the only tolerable ads on mobile. I used to build news sites for a living, the whole ecosystem runs on the fact that there are users who will click anything. It's dirty, and I liken it to making money by selling free trials that people forget to cancel. Which is why I stopped doing it.
I don't think it's so much that Betty need to buy a subscription, most people just aren't willing to do that, they would rather just deal with ad filled pages. How many people for example pay for gmail? Same problem.
The main issue is how do news websites make money? Other than spamming us with ads, which itself has low ROI, no news website has been able to figure a good solution. And if you point to sites like NY Times, ask yourself first if they are really succeeding if they also didn't spam us with ads too...
Does she use a browser to access them, or the Newsstand?
The Newsstand applications for both of those publications seem remarkably un-terrible, compared to their mobile websites. I agree that many news websites, even the mainstream ones, seem full of booby traps, and that it is a problem in general — just that there does seem to be a solution for this specific case.
Testing it out, I can't find any ads in the New Yorker app. However, the New York Times app has ads on the side near the bottom of articles, and most annoying, inline links to related NYT articles.
The problem with the links to previous articles is that clicking on them (accidentally or not) takes you to the NYT website. Suddenly you start getting the regular annoyances without it being obvious what you did wrong, and you are not automatically logged in so you will also begin getting notifications about using up your allowed number of free articles.
I am skeptical that anything the w3c puts out is "a solution" to anything other than increasingly complex design-by-committee recommendations that no one ever fully implements. How about just good graphic design?
Reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes good graphic design. Further, it has little to do with UI/UX. Even further, most UI/UX designers nowadays are focused on the result (the page), rather than doing a lot of the foundation work of creating the interaction model, etc.
I have little visibility into this field, but it strikes me as one with an awful lot of people stretching their self-description. Even amongst the hard core practitioners (UCD/HCI/human factors people), there are many charlatans who cargo cult.
True! And I'm pretty certain that things will only get better once a substantial fraction of the people making web sites gets into this age and have the same problems.
My Great-Uncle (~89) has a Windows laptop. He virtually never uses it. One time I decided to start it up, and it literally had about ten updates that each required a restart. It was a disaster for me, and I do this for a living. I just can't imagine how they expect someone like him to use it.
I have a windows laptop that I use 2 or 3 times a week and sometimes I have 10 updates pending (2 of which fail repeatedly until I uninstall them and re-download them). This is a huge downside of continuous delivery to something that isn't cloud based.
+1 My 93 year old Dad uses a stylus for him iPad Air and it really helps him. He also has a Mac Desktop Pro (for his video editing and 3D animation) and has less trouble with mouse and keyboard.
The a good small device skill is the "soft touch" because then only a small part of your finger is making contact with the touch screen. My Dad seems to have problems doing this.
You know this is the primary business model when Slashdot moves to putting four huge ads right below the summary and fills the screen right to the absolute edges. I don't know how many times I've clicked on the Cardashian game by accident. Is there even one person who reads Slashdot and would play any of those advertised games? Slashdot must expect tons of accidental clicks, though I don't see why the game publishers would want to pay for them?!
most of the bigger news outlets have very nice mobile apps.
you can buy subscriptions on there and read the news without ads.
since this is obviously not really working (yet?),
i am really curious on how future journalists will generate revenue other than ads (eventually something will come up i guess).
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadGranted, it's a little lacking in peripheral details, like whether that's her only news source...
[0] - http://313e5987718b346aaf83-f5e825270f29a84f7881423410384342...
Damn you flat ui!
The whole point of going with raised buttons and such was to provide a visual cue as to what was clickable. It seems UI people who missed the early 90's are getting to relearn this lesson. When I saw flat I just shook my head.
I'll never understand why these designer types think that discarding all of that context is a good thing.
I'm thoroughly convinced I'm correct, but have no data to back it up.
Count me in!
"The design of the iPhone software was entirely informed by the fact that this was a new experience, it was nothing like using an existing smartphone, nor anything like using a Mac or Windows PC. It needed training wheels to get people up to speed. Thus, to name one small example, why iOS buttons have tended to look so very button-y. To inform the user, as clearly as possible, that this is a button that can be tapped.
Look around you. Any street corner. Any office. Any shopping mall. Any restaurant. You will see people tapping on touchscreens. We all get it now. iOS-style computing is no longer novel; it is now the standard interaction model for personal computing.
The primary problem Apple faced with the iPhone in 2007 was building familiarity with a new way of using computers. That problem has now been solved. It is time to solve new problems."
(You can try to invent your own UI cue to take the place of the underline, of course, but then the user has to learn a new cue for each separate site, whereas the underline is still common enough for people to have already learned it somewhere else.)
I must confess I've been guilty of it too. I 'invented' a style of link whereby the link has a border on all four sides and is filled with a transparent pastel. I've even seen this around some (apparently it is kind of an obvious idea). But all in all, I've gotten away from trying to invent my own UI.
If web designers could actually stop and think about the virtual things they do in physical terms they might be able to see how foolish they're being, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
I think this also leads back to the idea that the touchscreen as a user interface is absolutely awful in every way except for the one huge advantage of its reconfigurability. (I forget the source for this, but there's a specific article I'm thinking of.)
[1] http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/affordance/
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
That's a big feature IMHO. My use of the car radio is essentially to toggle it from AUX to BT. Integration of my phone would be even nicer.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/22/the-maker-movement-starts-...
Go through the products available at a site like sparkfun or adafruit and tell me you couldn't make some awesome customization control panel system? Larger buttons for smartphone-specific functions, some with their own small (and low-cost) discrete display perhaps?
I've been wanting this for twenty-five years.
There are things that do some of this, but not very well, and not very cost-effectively. There is software that simulates this on a touchscreen (grr). Anyone fancy a hardware startup?
How about forgetting the electronics, and seeing controllers as just another UI problem. Software, implemented in plastic.
What would you want to build if it were that easy? Custom controllers for games? Custom games? MIDI Instruments? Dashboards with physical elements? Home / media center controls? POS interfaces? Hardware usability testing prototypes? Kitchen gadgets?
Maybe I'd be the only market, but I think it would be a big blurring of the line between hacker and maker culture.
Pressure displays (2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smai_Z_galE . I can't believe they didn't attempt to build "pixels" of some kind though. More recently, a lot of ultrasound tech (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaoO5cY1aHk . Tangible displays from MIT (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvtfD_rJ2hE .
I could see any of this being feasible for interacting in a non-mobile setting (car,desktop) with some adjustments.
Also those relegendable knobs and sliders are very popular in the music industry already 0 - so it would be fairly trivial to bring it to a consumer device.
I see learning UI in computers as a process that begins with a new user having basic UI concepts explained to him, and then just following the changing trends, where a new trend usually makes "affordances" refer to the previous trend.
Same thing with volume controls, used to be dials now it's buttons. Maybe I just like dials.
Edit: Just realized we are talking about websites here. Sorry, forget what I said!
This happened to me, I went from ios 5 to 8. I had to google "where is spotlight ios 8" to learn to swipe down.
What would I have done if I were a novice user who didn't know spotlight existed? I might not have found it for months.
The latest UI trends to remove "button style" and go to "flat" and just text is a prime example of how we've gone the wrong direction.
I've used it as my main source of getting news from back home. Ignoring the quality of the editing (I spot a spelling or obvious grammar mistake almost daily), the app is decent.
It's straightforward. I can pick the categories I want. It just gives you the top X articles per category, nothing more. Doesn't link you elsewhere. One headline, one thumbnail image, sometimes 1 image embedded in the article. There's are very few buttons to be confused by. One of them is font size. I'd say it's pretty grandma-friendly!
If you're in the UK, yes. Otherwise, there are ads.
Why the Drudge Report is the one of the best designed sites on the web... https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
HN submission... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9188663
However they have ads within articles now, including some full page ads between article pages.
I use the NPR news app on my phone, and rarely encounter an ad. Nice benefit is that most of the stories have narrated audio if she wants to switch modes.
If you're in a position to suggest, let people donate to NPR to get a version of the app that never shows ads as their reward.
I noticed mine recently started very occasionally showing ads down on the bottom, but surely the ad revenue from delivering them to a single person is smaller than the amount a typical NPR listener will donate (if they donate at all).
And the CBC doesn't help its public perception (who have the power to advocate for increased funding) when they give leeway to their stars like Jian Ghomeshi and Amanda Lang that would be unacceptable in other companies.
And it's even considering selling it's Toronto HQ amid staff reductions and budget cuts.
My point? Enjoy CBC while it lasts. Because in a decade or so, it may not even close to comparable to the likes of NPR, BBC, et al.
I click on things by accident, I have trouble scrolling on some websites, sometimes the text is too small and crammed into a column that is too small for it, pop-ups and strange noises happen constantly.
I too would like it if more web documents were available as simply formatted blocks of text and pictures, with links that I didn't accidentally click constantly.
Yep, it is something of a throwback to resistive screens. But with resistives at least there was a distinction between resting the finger on the screen, and interacting with a on-screen object.
This still wouldn't be enough for people with diseases that cause major tremors, but I'd imagine it's enough for people who have lost fine motor control, because we're only trying to distinguish pushing from not-pushing.
Additionally, human touch sensation is incredibly good in the fingers, hypothesized to be related to our use of tools. That we can at all use such a touch screen is a miracle in the animal kingdom. Replacing this is not possible at this point in time as we age. However, larger and more clear buttons will help, along with a training period and good motivation for the person. As we age, we need to have the motivation to access the world and the opportunity to do so. The future requires all participants of every age.
A good place to start on the sources is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563781/ . Let me know if you want a .pdf and cannot access the site past the abstract.
Chimpanzees can also use touch screens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNV0rSndJ0
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_...
Skip to 15:52 if you want to go straight to the one playing Pac-Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVpNiRpcSs
Problem is many apps have universal binaries now so you can't force the lower-res (larger touch target) UIs.
Another tip for helping people with slow internet: don't break your article into multiple pages! I think the primary reason for doing this to get more ad traffic, but I promise I will leave when I see that your list of ten items is separated into ten pages.
Safari on iOS is my typical example: Click on link by accident, notice your mistake, go back to original page, Safari does a full reload. If you have no network you can't continue reading. Why can't Safari cache the page and allow quick navigation, like any desktop browser?
I realise that in those situations I just have to click fast twice, so that the second click takes place before scripts have been loaded - but I'm sure Betty does not know that.
Oh, that's why rapid clicking works! Funny how for some problems I only want a solution and don't bother at all thinking about how it works.
The FT is a good example, the site is unreadable for me. So I no longer visit it.
Fortunately the only story I read there is available on its own page (hpmor.com).
This is one of the main reasons Google is moving towards a focus on mobile usability. One of their biggest warnings I see site owners get slammed for is "links too close together" and this is a great example of that.
I actually do this more when reading a physical newspaper than reading newspapers online. With several articles laid out on the same physical page and articles jumping from one page to another mid-article, I read articles uninterrupted beginning to end much less frequently than when reading on the typical newspaper website. Or am I misunderstanding what you'er saying here?
However, news companies would lose money and go out of business since heavy advertising is their business, but should an entity relying on borderline spam have any necessary reason to stay around?
And do memory fail me, or did the early web work in the same manner?
I think there is a big hole in the market for software that is designed to be as easy as possible at the expense of power/flexibility. The article talks about people 75+, but I think the cutoff where a majority of people have a hard time with computers is younger than that. I bet that someone who really tried hard to make an integrated suite of senior-friendly software would do well.
Yes, the reason is the kid doesn't have to worry about paying for it when it breaks, so they don't care.
Informing my mom that she should just try stuff out on her Mac b/c she isn't going to break stuff was huge to help her get over her fear that she's going to click a wrong button and break something on a very expensive device.
[This doesn't address the issue of malware, of course, which is (in a sense) "breaking" your security by clicking a link]
Either way, kids don't care yet and just plow on doing whatever.
I had the same issue with my mom, it became better when I told her that the computer will ask before doing something irreversal (and even then it might be fixable), and I will only help her after she thinks she broke it.
While I was happily taking apart the OS as a kid. The only thing that really broke was a game that switched to US layout after I checked it out in a hex editor. (The Sims, you can read the comments in the code, quite neat. :) )
Even worse is when an add overlays the entire page and I can't click around it. It's infuriating.
"Our A/B testing shows that this design increases ad clicks by statistically significant amount"
And in this article I think their ageism lead to a logical failure: they say the number of old people is growing, as if people are losing their abilities as they age (which is of course true but not really relevant to "have you chosen to learn to use computers"). Amusingly, they similtaensously make this logical error and acknowledge it by saying eventually all old people will be digital natives... But in the meantime the population is growing.
This is how the news site makes their money and the reason why it's free to view the articles. Betty needs to purchase a subscription to view articles ad-free (if the sites she browses offer it)
Although, one potential option for someone like Betty is SmartNews https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.gocro.smart... That app offers a "SmartView" which scrapes the news sites they link to and provides text-only versions of the articles.
Now Betty needs to "login" to her news site every time in order to disable the ads (not to mention pay, and renew service each term) I don't think that will improve the process, and it ad more steps with potentially confusing instruction to her process. Even if the site was able to store along term cookie for Betty, I doubt the sublt difference between versions would do much as there is typically a lot of other "junk" (around the article) that can distract the user.
In practice, of course, Betty will do neither of these things; she'll just use the same username and password everywhere. So then it's just a matter of time until a hack on one of the sites she visits opens her up to all kinds of new problems.
Username/password authentication is so, so utterly broken.
The reason is the same as in print: ad revenues generally bring in much more than subscriptions do. Here's some data for the newspaper business, for instance: http://ajr.org/2014/02/27/big-shift-reliance-reader-payments... You can see how even with the collapse of newspaper advertising over the last decade, ad revenue is still generally somewhere from 50-70% of overall revenue. So ad revenue is critical, even for subscription pubs.
This is even more true online, because if you make your publication ad-free for subscription users, you're cutting the ads off from the eyeballs the advertisers want most -- the eyeballs of engaged, frequent readers/viewers/whatever, since those are the very people who care enough to buy subscriptions. So doing so drives down the overall value of advertising in your publication.
The main issue is how do news websites make money? Other than spamming us with ads, which itself has low ROI, no news website has been able to figure a good solution. And if you point to sites like NY Times, ask yourself first if they are really succeeding if they also didn't spam us with ads too...
The Newsstand applications for both of those publications seem remarkably un-terrible, compared to their mobile websites. I agree that many news websites, even the mainstream ones, seem full of booby traps, and that it is a problem in general — just that there does seem to be a solution for this specific case.
Also interesting: moisture in hands helps with scrolling. As you age, moisture decreases.
The problem with the links to previous articles is that clicking on them (accidentally or not) takes you to the NYT website. Suddenly you start getting the regular annoyances without it being obvious what you did wrong, and you are not automatically logged in so you will also begin getting notifications about using up your allowed number of free articles.
Accessibility is for everyone, not just people with "special needs".
I have little visibility into this field, but it strikes me as one with an awful lot of people stretching their self-description. Even amongst the hard core practitioners (UCD/HCI/human factors people), there are many charlatans who cargo cult.
The a good small device skill is the "soft touch" because then only a small part of your finger is making contact with the touch screen. My Dad seems to have problems doing this.
You know this is the primary business model when Slashdot moves to putting four huge ads right below the summary and fills the screen right to the absolute edges. I don't know how many times I've clicked on the Cardashian game by accident. Is there even one person who reads Slashdot and would play any of those advertised games? Slashdot must expect tons of accidental clicks, though I don't see why the game publishers would want to pay for them?!
since this is obviously not really working (yet?), i am really curious on how future journalists will generate revenue other than ads (eventually something will come up i guess).