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, …

And then we have insanity like Instagram, where the logo opens a separate area

How the hell does the logo ever load anything but the home screen?

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.

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