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Open source vs proprietary software (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 days ago* by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 32 points 1 day ago (1 child)

Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone "The menu button" "There is no menu button" "It's a hamburger icon" "What?" "3 lines" "How is that a menu?"

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  • [–] 29 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

    I often help my parents use their phones.
    It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:

    • Buttons and tabs can be any combination of Colored Square, White Square with Outline or Grey Text on White Background (and they switch every screen!)
    • Modals without a scroll bar so you can't tell there's a "Confirm" button at the bottom
    • Awfully confusing share dialogs before the Native system share sheet opens
    • Inconsistent iconography
    • Overflow menus hidden behind 3 dots, 3 lines or neither

    I feel like it's almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 hours ago

    It’s because tech savvy people see digital products like old people would see a thingamajig out of a woodshop. We have an inherent understanding that the thing we’re looking at had a creator intention behind it, as well as an understanding that they may have done a poor job implementing that intention. We understand more underlying patterns to look for. We have a deeper intuition of what is “right” and that any “wrong” can be infinitely different than any other “wrong.” We know the internet isn’t prod; the internet is like your feature branch on steroids. We understand that the internet often uses fancy tricks to scale, and those tricks can lead to behaviors which seem to contradict causality (e.g., distributed systems, you receive a message before it was sent because of eventual consistency). These are problems we’ve been exposed to over and over, forced ourselves to work our way through them, even built some of the machines that had these issues.

    Old people had similar advantages with things like housework, woodwork, automotive work, …

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Back during covid we sent my wife's grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.

    I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.

    It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.

    My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He'd probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It's utterly incomprehensible. I'm sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn't need you to see the screen.

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  • [–] 8 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    We've got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I’m working on a mobile app, this commentary is very helpful to me.

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  • [–] 4 points 12 hours ago

    I think a great test is grab a 5 year old budget phone with low screen resolution and slow CPU, and hand it to a few people with your app on it for a few minutes. See what they complain about or can't figure out.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago

    If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
    Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.

    I know responsive design is hard but damn...

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