from Hacker News

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman

by grzm on 10/16/23, 4:37 PM with 129 comments

by lxe on 10/16/23, 5:59 PM
Don Norman's gripe applies not only to the elderly. I think good usability benefits everyone, and I do sympathise with him when it comes to the direction Apple has been taking for the past 10 years or so.
I don't think it's aesthetics vs usability that's at the core here -- I don't think at all that aesthetics and usability are somehow mutually exclusive. I think it's simply the lack of focus on first principles outlined by Don Normal himself.
HCI used to be front and center in the collective minds of the Internet, but it slowly faded to the background. As an example, check out the dates on the articles referenced in the "Mystery Meat Navigation" Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation#Refere...
I think it's neat that our affordances are evolving (we don't need to have things looking exactly like physical buttons anymore for us to click on them). But at the same time, we should still apply ergonomic guidelines when designing interfaces, whether it's for the elderly, or not.
by iamcalledrob on 10/16/23, 5:56 PM
Apple's switch away from the physical home button to gestures has created a usability threshold for the iPhone that many can't cross.
Intricate gestures are difficult to grok for some, and difficult to perform for others. Try using an iPhone and closing an app with shaky hands.
Currently the iPhone SE still has a physical button, but I'm worried what device I'll start recommending to older/less tech savvy people when that goes away.
iOS itself is a bit of a disaster zone too now. I see people constantly get stuck having activated the "press to edit your lock screen" by mistake, or getting confused by a constant stream of ads for iCloud, Apple Arcade etc.
It's sad because most of this poor UX is unnecessary. It feels like its origins are in Apple no longer caring, combined with running out of real ideas and getting distracted with things like widgets.
by GMoromisato on 10/16/23, 8:42 PM
Not in this article, but Don Norman also frequently rails against complex conceptual models.
The other day, my mom was complaining that her phone was not ringing and it took me forever to figure it out. I had to go to Google to find a troubleshooting guide.
The problem is that there are multiple ways to prevent a phone call from ringing. You can switch the hardware button (silent mode), you can set focus mode on (or have it set automatically), and you can mute individual people in the address book. Or you can add people to a group so that they ring even if the phone is in focus mode (but not in silent mode). There are probably other ways I've forgotten.
Already we've introduced a bunch of concepts: silent mode, focus mode, muting individual people, exceptions to focus mode, etc. And the user has to figure out these concepts just from looking at the UI. But if you don't understand the entire conceptual model, you may not know why something is not working.
This problem can't be solved with better affordances or more text labels, unfortunately. Maybe LLMs will eventually save us. Instead of the user having to figure out the capabilities and UI of the device, the device tries to figure out the intent of the user.
by scarygliders on 10/16/23, 7:38 PM
> Designers and companies of the world, you are badly serving an ever-growing segment of your customer base, a segment that you too will one day inhabit.
That last part - "a segment that you too will one day inhabit" - is one which should be shouted from the rooftops and ingrained into folks when they are in their early teens or twenties - before they get employed as designers of any kind.
by bitwize on 10/16/23, 11:02 PM
I'm deeply concerned about when my dad is forced to update to Windows 11. He's 80 years old now, bought his first computer about 40 years ago, and used it to write programs to do engineering calculations. So, a fairly technical user from the jump, and has gotten accustomed to everything from 8-bit micros, through DOS and Unix to Windows. And dammit, the shit these companies are pulling is just going to invalidate his prior knowledge and leave him confused and pissed off, calling me for help (like I know jack about how the modern hodgepodge of Windows works). When Don Norman writes that the digital realm is no country for old men, I can see it in my father's increasing bafflement, I can feel it in myself.
I think that a big part of the reason why vi (later vim) and Emacs used to enjoy dual status as the canonical hackers' text editors is because their interfaces didn't change much, so skill with them would serve you a lifetime and could be passed to upcoming generations. I recently fired up Xenix in an emulator, and found that I was quite facile in using its copy of vi to manipulate text, because the skills I'd developed on Vim on modern Linux machines translated well all the way back to that ancient editor. Vim added a lot but the fundamentals are the same.
When the interface changes, just for the sake of changing, every two years or less, how can you feel like anything you learn will be relevant?
by gumby on 10/16/23, 10:37 PM
A couple of good examples of "good usability benefits everyone":
The company OXO makes kitchen gadgets originally designed for reduced mobility (i.e. older people) but now popular with everyone.
The ADA: having, for example, a ramp, doesn't just help people in wheelchairs: if I have something difficult to carry (or am using a cart) or have a temporary injury that makes steps hard to navigate I'm glad there's a ramp.
In many ways I consider the vast majority of designers and architects to be working away from their putative goals, instead pursuing egotism.
by sopooneo on 10/16/23, 7:20 PM
Just posting this here for anyone like me that had read some of Don Norman's work, but not The Design of Everyday Things, and was confused by a certain differing use of vocabulary.
In his original coining of the term, Normal used "affordance" to mean a thing an object allowed to be done, but some user, usually a human, sometimes another object. For instance, a chair affords sitting by a person. A door handle affords opening.
But in the design world "affordance" is now almost ubuiquitously used to mean some visual hint added to a design element to indicate what can be done with it. For instance, in a UI, you might say that you added an "affordance" in the form of a drop shadow to show a button is clickable (probably a crappy example, me being a non-ui person).
In the later editions of Design of Everyday Things, Norman addresses this difference (perhaps we could say evolution) of his idea and term. If I remember correctly, he does not love this conflation of ideas, but has come to terms with it.
by karaterobot on 10/16/23, 7:08 PM
> Then there’s the aesthetic problem. When products are developed for the elderly, they tend to be ugly and an unwanted signal of fragility.
Just an observation: My main takeaway from The Design of Everyday Things was that design should make it obvious what the thing is for, and how to use it. Affordance is the big keyword. I think these mobility tools succeed in that respect. Maybe his point here is that an ugly cane makes it look like it's a tool for dying slowly, but a more likely explanation is that it is what he's saying on the surface: that aesthetics matter too. I wonder whether this is a change of heart, of just a change of emphasis for this particular article.
by esquivalience on 10/16/23, 8:05 PM
This is Don Norman whose work led to the term a Norman Door. A push door which has a pullable handle on it tricks the user into thinking it's a pull door. Sure, you can just push it if you know; but good design should be intuitive without prior knowledge.
by zzzeek on 10/16/23, 9:59 PM
cosign on the small text thing. I had perfect eyesight and could read anything a mile away until I was 50. now I can't even read my phone, and there's literally some manuals / printing that I still cannot read even with my reading glasses on. My eyes always used to work great so you have no idea what a big change this is until all the sudden it happens.
by frankfrank13 on 10/16/23, 5:57 PM
this is the author of Design of Everyday Things, which I have to assume is at the high end of the unread-after-buying ratio. Still a super impressive person.
by m3kw9 on 10/16/23, 7:36 PM
This the reason Apple started with skeumorph UI when they released the iPhone because of affordances life like button, but as more people use it and get used to it, they can afford to get away from it(7 years later in iOS 7). And then (iOS 13 another almost 7 years) to all gesture front screen. And this will of course leave some people behind that have never used a full touch device but it’s hard to move forward but still have classic controls. I suppose there was a time when hardware buttons had the same issue when they first came out 100s of years ago
by valine on 10/16/23, 6:49 PM
Those gestures that have to be memorized allow you to efficiently navigate your phone. I don't want a phone that sacrifices efficiency for ease of use. If you're actually struggling to use your phone please just turn on assistive access.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
by unethical_ban on 10/16/23, 7:42 PM
I think manuals should be written, but not required for simple usage of an OS UI.
"Tutorial" style introductions to the OS make sense.
I remember when Ubuntu first came out with Unity, and had really powerful window tiling features bound to variations of "Super" key + arrow key, as well as some other hotkeys.
The great thing about it was that you could hold down "Super" for 1 second, and a reference would show up explaining all the different keybinds.
by spit2wind on 10/16/23, 8:23 PM
> Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker
Is that the whole article? If not, maybe it should be.
by virtualritz on 10/16/23, 8:20 PM
I think the issue can be party broken down to this: UX != HCI.
I can't remember the last time I sat in a meeting with someone with the title "interface designer". Everyone in this realm today is a "UX something" and commonly it seems these people have never:
- heard the term HCI or know what it actually stands for.
- read and/or internalized the human interface guidelines for the platform(s) they're building for (there is a lot of overlap but still).
- thought in way that puts ease of use/discoverability/context dependence front and center, over anything else. How to do something seems often arbitrary/there seem to be no HCI-based guide rails by which decisions are taken.
That said, there are exceptions of course, but they seem rarer by the year.
One issue is that we now have a generation of young people that just grok stuff because they grew up completely digital and with apps that already have arguably crappy interfaces.
I.e. they can and will work with even the worst interface or something that shuns all standards/guidelines of the platform/OS it runs under.
When you then have people from this generation getting jobs as "UX something" you have self a perpetuating loop that inevitably leads to the increased enshittification of user interfaces.
And no one is really to blame for it.
by nitwit005 on 10/17/23, 3:59 AM
> Then there’s the aesthetic problem. When products are developed for the elderly, they tend to be ugly and an unwanted signal of fragility. As a result, people who need walkers or canes often resist. Once upon a time, a cane was stylish: Today it is seen as a medical device.
The canes didn't change. If anything they look nicer, and you have more options.
People are going to hate anything associated with being handicapped or elderly, no matter what the design is.
by stakhanov on 10/16/23, 7:06 PM
While I agree with him in substance, I think it's also worth pointing out that the "negative nancy" has been a rhetorical device he's been using throughout his career. So instead of "What I see today horrifies me", it should more accurately be "What I've been seeing has consistently horrified me, to this day". No real newsflash here.
by theyinwhy on 10/16/23, 8:35 PM
It's ironic there is a non-closable video at the bottom that just keeps distracting while reading.
by fredgrott on 10/16/23, 8:52 PM
Be careful folks, why?
Ever read both Don Norman's books? One clearly counters the other one and yet most design posers never have noticed!
by DonHopkins on 10/16/23, 9:54 PM
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
by syngrog66 on 10/17/23, 5:07 PM
reminds me to write a piece about GUI anti-patterns one day
by JSavageOne on 10/16/23, 8:01 PM
As I load this article on mobile a video pops up taking up half my screen with no obvious way to get rid of it, how ironic.
by OnlyMortal on 10/16/23, 5:23 PM
Inside Macintosh Volume 1?
by jupp0r on 10/16/23, 10:24 PM
I agree with Don Norman's points on product design, but I couldn't help but think that the current world is also designed to benefit those people who will never live long enough to be impacted by the consequences of our current inaction to stop/reverse/mitigate climate change.