- cross-posted to:
- godzilla@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- godzilla@lemmy.world
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Helping my octogenarian mom with her iPhone is the most painful experience. She often calls me about something that has “popped up” in some app that she’s using. I tell her to just close it and she says “how?” I then say something like “just click the OK button … or the Done or Close buttons, that will be some unknown color … or click the X in the upper right or maybe the upper left corner … or click “Done” or “Close” in the toolbar, on the left or right sides … or maybe the thing has slid up from the bottom and you need to swipe down to get rid of it … or maybe you need to click the Home tab on the app’s bottom bar.”
I’ve actually been an iOS mobile developer for 15 years now. Anybody who thinks there’s any sort of consistent, intuitive design principles behind Apple products is insane.
My mother is very smart. She knows her shit, but her shit does not include tech anything, which, unfortunately, makes her obviously afraid of it. She claims otherwise, but it’s true. If anything goes wrong once, it will forever be that way to her. She’s also incredibly stubborn.
To touch on that last point, she went through her advanced schooling in the 60s, at a time when typing was apparently taught at universities. Her professor made one comment about the women in the room going on to be secretaries, which my mom has clinged to, like so many other things, and now spitefully refuses to learn how to type properly.
I’ve shown her every single time I touch her laptop how to scroll through sites using two fingers on the touch pad. Nope, she must very slowly, squinting, find the tiny, hidden scroll bar, and, even more slowly, drag it down.
Her ability to read seems to completely disappear as soon as she turns on her computer or looks at her phone. After over a decade of holding her hand to do super basic things, the answers to which are almost always found by reading and comprehending, I made it a point to not outright tell her what to do if it’s plainly obvious anymore. She still tries to get me to do it for her by staring at the screen for a moment and then looking at me like she’s completely lost, or asking in the most annoyed way possible what to do, when the only options are click OK or… nothing.
“How do I do (x)?” Where (x) is something like opening Firefox from the desktop, going back to her browser-based email from a different tab, etc.
“You know how. You’ve done it several times before.”
“That doesn’t mean I remember how!” While actively doing the thing.
And the gestures - dismissive hand waving at the screen whenever something mildly inconvenient appears, the annoyed sighs, all of it.
My father is 85, used to be a dev. No issues, maintains his file sync between his two sites by himself via various clouds. Sticks to Windows.
Can’t get him to use proper passwords (as in random generated stuff from his password manager) though, he insists on needlessly peppering the weak-ish passwords he comes up with and storing that in his decent password manager instead. I guess you can’t win them all.
You know what, it’s better than writing all his passwords down in a little notebook in his filing cabinet
Not a specific incident so much as a running theme in logical inconsistency… What on God’s green Earth possessed these people to think that I, the “nerd” of the family, having gone completely digital except where legally necessary since about the late 90s, would have the faintest idea how to fix a fucking printer?
My parents: “You’re a nerd, can you help with our computer?”
I reluctantly overlook how insulting they always are and help
Many months later
My parents: “Our computer isn’t working right lately. It’s probably your fault from the last time you were messing with it.”
It’s probably your fault from the last time you were messing with it.
“Ok, you better ask someone else then. Clearly I’ll only make it worse.”
You’ll never prove them wrong by falling for the manipulation tactic.
You should answer:
And it is your fault being assholes. Live with the consequences.
Then cut contact as much as possible
Is the Lemmy version of “lawyer up, hit the gym” basically just “cut contact with family at the slightest insult”?
my parents always having a difficult time remembering password, just one password. and asking me to help to login their health insurance app on their phones, sadly idk what is happening with the app. its always logging out account after a while of not being used.
the worst part was they once asked me to remove the password system from the app, so they can always use the app peacefully, im not an IT person. so im having a hard time to explain why can’t i remove the password system
pardon my english :)
Those are just standard security features. Soon, most apps will be MFA, meaning your parents will need to receive a texted code before they can login- AFTER inputting their password.
Just don’t. You’re wasting your time with this IT stuff anyway and now theirs too. And you should have fixed the printer not printing yesterday already.
It’s a thankless job.
My parents had a new printer installed by a “professional” but it wouldn’t show on the network. I tried everything, reinstalling drivers, unplugging and plugging cables again…
After hours of nothing working, i got desperate and just flipped through the menu of the printer on this small LCD display. There is a DHCP setting. The DHCP is set to a fixed address. The router every now and then reboots and gives new dynamic addresses. The printer refused its dynamic address all this time.
my dad once asked me to copy files from his desktop to his disk, and then double and triple asked me if he can now delete the files on his desktop safely
you’d think he’d have had copying files figured out after a decade of owning a laptop, but alas
Teaching slowly how to convert pdf to mobi to my mom for her kindle, each step, doing it with her, and 0 success. I don’t mind it, I know she gets very frustrated with technology but it still sucks.
Calibre cli, make a shortcut for drag&drop?
ikr why can’t my boomer mom learn a simple few hundred lines of bash
Not she, you.
This, set up calibre to automatically convert and sync the files to your mom’s kindle.
When she was trying to explain File Allocation Tables to me as we attempted to fix my disk as a kid.
Thankfully, both of my parents worked in IT from the '80s, so they’re generally pretty good at getting things figured out.
I don’t know about most painful, but my dad bought a phone many months ago and last week, he wanted to know how to turn on the flashlight on it. I was ready to edit the notification dropdown or give a five step explainer or whatever.
Turns out, nope, you just pull down the notification bar and there’s a pretty obvious flashlight button right there. The problem is, you see, he did not know you could drag down the notification bar. There were dozens of notifications there.
I really cannot blame him either. I don’t know what UX designer came up with just putting a bar at the top and expecting users to know that you can drag on it. But yeah, still, ouch.
You want affordances? Get out of here you filthy leper!
- every UI designer this century, apparently 🤦
I mean, give people a damn clue at least? No? Hm.
I remember when “make it obvious what can be clicked on and what can’t” was a basic design principle. That one got tossed a long time ago.
A few weeks ago, my parents complained that the laptop kept going to a “screensaver” while they were trying to work on it.
So I changed the screensaver setting from like 3 minutes to 15 minutes… but it kept happening. I knew something was up when they said “well it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to reopen the Internet every time.”
Guys… it was a touchscreen laptop. They were grabbing it by the corner and closing out the window. 😆 And one of these people showed me how to make a website in HTML when I was younger…
Are we all doomed to be daft in our old age?
I can only hope I get my chance at the bliss of ignorance one day.
“C’mon you guys! There it is right in front of you the whole time. You’re dereferencing a null pointer! Open your eyes!”
My dad had a printer that wasn’t working for months. I finally looked at it when I was over there and found that the USB cable was plugged into the ethernet jack.
