alt Hacker NewsI witnessed my great aunt of 85 trying to watch TV. It was sad and painful. How ux is forgetting this entire generation is just terrible.
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This, 100%.
I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).
Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.
UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.
My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays). I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and channel down a damned TV any more.
Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-CEC) you can control everything with one remote.
With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.
It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.
When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.
The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.
I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.