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@jessamyn @jmjm Yes! How could they make something with such an illiquid design???

@jmjm i feel all of this so very much, it's the primary reason why my mom won't use a smartphone or a smart TV: the interfaces are too busy and complicated for older folks, especially older folks with manual dexterity problems.

Honestly the modern world is terrifying and opaque to most folks over 70.

@jmjm For about the last five or six weeks of her life, my mom just couldn't answer her phone. The Android UI changed sometime during her final year and the new one gave her trouble, and it was too much at the end.

So yeah, I didn't speak much with her during her last days

@jmjm I had a bout of impaired cognition a few months back and I found it really hard with actions only available by swipe since I couldn't remember if I was supposed to swipe up/down/sideways etc. I found some applications with functions only available by gestures really hard to use.
Developers should really make sure that functionality be discoverable and that swipes give indications of what will happen when you release the swipe.

@jmjm When has a google product not been vaguely user hostile?

@jmjm an issue my nonagenarian parents also had was difficulty with touch screens and smaller buttons. Their sense of touch was just not as acute as younger folks. I really appreciate your complaints about vision… HUGE problem for my Dad especially.

@jmjm that's an interesting issue: I realise that I orient the phone without looking at it by the location of the side buttons; don't impaired people do the same sort of thing?

@robparsons @jmjm Queue the horrible design of the remote for the Sony Bravia TV: almost perfectly symmetric layout -- even buggers me and I don't have any impairments (except a short fuse).

@jmjm I also hate the change to screen gestures for navigation instead of an actual navigation interface.
Swiping from the right edge of the screen to navigate back gets dicey in something like the GMail app when swiping right-to-left deletes emails.
Or swiping up from the bottom to navigate home which gets tricky if your phone is sitting on a charging stand.

@jmjm
My father has that on his phone, apparently. Maybe it is best for him, but *I* cannot deal with it.

@jmjm I don’t know the details or full context of your folks’ situation, obviously, but I would keep an eye on this: https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-marks-global-accessibility-awareness-day-with-features-coming-to-ios-ipados-and-macos-later-this-year/

@jmjm My dad has Parkinson's so I feel every word of this rant.

@jmjm this is sad. I know people on Google accessibility team and I know they take this stuff seriously.

@jmjm Just switched to Android along with an older family member and it has, to be honest, been a bit frustrating. This family member is good at video games - which have painstakingly taught them every complicated detail with tutorials and tooltips - and the Android phone doesn't seem to be user friendly in that way at all.

Google's really messed up when someone can play a super complicated gacha JRPG like a pro, but misses a call because they can't figure out how to answer it.

@jmjm I for one have always found icons on mobile to be utterly meaningless

@jmjm I don’t work for Google but I can see how this would be so easily overlooked and, as accessibility advocate, I acknowledge this is a problem. I assume this would be the same for when a service gets rebranded. Would you perhaps have any input onto how to make a transition of such magnitude as painless as possible?

@rodrigoescobar @jmjm Here’s my input. Don’t rebrand. If you think you have a new brand that will do better, just launch the new brand and let it compete with your existing one. Can you imagine if Proctor and Gamble decided to rebrand Tide as Cheer or Bold and had the ability to change the label on your laundry detergent bottles on your shelf?

It has gotten bad enough with app icons, that at this point I mostly use the find feature to launch apps because I have no clue what they are going to look like. Of course, that assumes that the apps don’t change their names. I am looking at you, Empower, who purchased Personal Capital and decided it would be a good idea to change the name of the app entirely.

Just don’t change shit, okay? If you want to make something new, go ahead, but leave the rest of us in peace. Why? Because brands matter. Brand cachet does NOT transfer. Re-branding alienates your most loyal customers. Re-branding suggests to those customers that if you don’t think brands matter, why should they, and frees them up to consider switching to a competitor. Personal Capital was a great brand. I was quite loyal. I already have to deal with Empower for my work deferred comp plan and their website has always been horrible. Rebranding the Personal Capital app is a signal to me and other customers that they don’t care about us, so I might as well take the opportunity to jump ship and shop around. It says to the customers “We are throwing away years of corporate good-will by eliminating the brand you love because we just wanted to eliminate our competitor.” That’s what re-branding does for you. That’s why successful brand marketers like P&G don’t re-brand.

Do they not teach Al Ries’s classic Positioning in marketing class any more??

@jmjm It's google, they are just full of themselves. And evil.

@jmjm Google tried to get me in a car crash because they decided to spontaneously move the clock on Android Auto without any warning. I really wish someone would create an open source alternative that will still work with the cars.

@jmjm that happens to people I know who have no dementia. Neither Google's marketers not their UX people live in the real world.

@jmjm I find it difficult, I don't like change. But yes, dementia will take that to a whole new level.

@jmjm I was so on board with this rant and then it pivoted into...somehow this is because maybe bigotry? I'm a middle aged white man who works in tech: where do I apply to get permission to also hate these pointless confusing UX changes that make using my devices into a daily minefield?

@jmjm

There's something true about this.

OTOH, the idea that only the white tech-bro elite should aspire to being able to cope with an icon change, feels like writing-off the capacities of 99% of humanity.