My wife’s uncle is a brilliant man. At his 76 he is a practicing
medical doctor, a poet, and a witty satirist. Regardless of his high mental
capacity he is savagely incapable of computer literacy. And I can’t blame him.
The world is becoming increasingly irrational. Computer, the jewel
of human creativity, fails to provide access to the majority of elderly people
who did not grow up in the environment of failed logic where the users have to remember,
or try and err, or guess instead of see and understand.
Apparently, software developers are not concerned with this
problem. As long as their product can be used by young people they do not
bother testing their products on groups of sane old people capable of
understanding logical things and not so much capable of memorizing weird icons,
jargon, and irrational steps.
We can’t expect such testing from small developers while
giants like Google and Facebook spectacularly ignore this problem and remain
inaccessible and unusable for absolute majority of the elderly.
I suspect that the problem is not so much the lack of
resources, but rather intuitive avoidance of massive negative results of such
testing when in a hundred testers none can follow the command except, perhaps,
for a few lucky blind shooters.
Recently invented new field in software development – the UX
(User Experience) does not seem to be concerned with this problem either. I
wish one day they come up with EUX, or the Elderly User Experience. Until then,
a huge slice of potential computer users remain watching TV.
Correction:
When my wife read this she mentioned that her uncle had to
resign as his medical office has recently deployed the computerized system that,
due to its unintuitiveness, required special training which, incidentally,
still did not eliminate the necessity to memorize a variety of weird tricks and
putting up with perverted logic. So, he quit.
