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  • Aug 11, 2026, 12:39 PM

    As someone who regularly helps elderly, low-vision, low-English-literacy & other folks who are struggling to understand them manage their phones (I know @jessamyn does this too), I cannot begin to explain to you the rage I feel at the designers & development organizations who foist these UI choices on a public not remotely equipped to navigate them.

    The controls are overwhelming, still. They’re couched in jargon, still. They’re hidden somewhere non-obvious, down the end of a four-node decision tree. Fifteen years after I left the industry things have only gotten worse. And the worst bit of all – as I always insisted then, based on my own extended observation – is that *users internalize the blame for their inability to comprehend the UI*.

    They wind up feeling stupid and incompetent. They wind up bewildered and scammed. They feel terrified to hit the wrong button, and then not be able to find it again. It’s so, so hard to watch. It breaks my heart, and it makes me furious.

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Replies

  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:45 PM

    Not that Apple is particularly great either, but I will single them out for heavily qualified praise. Stock Android phones are so much worse for older folks – I had no idea. *So* much worse.

    Factor in the absolute necessity to stay on top of OS upgrades – which is not, to begin with, a concept most of the people I work with really understand – and I have no hesitation in arguing that Android devices are not fit for purpose so far as elderly users are concerned.

    ETA: *Do not purchase Android devices for your parents or elderly friends, relatives or loved ones* unless you are either certain they are familiar with industry conventions or are prepared to do regular, close-grained tech support.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:06 PM

    Here are two real examples from today that might help illustrate some of what I mean:

    – A woman in her seventies, intelligent, reasonably proficient but definitely a non-native English speaker, terrified that the official Apple notification to update iOS (which appears next to Settings, as a number in red circle) was an attempt to scam her.

    – A woman in her sixties, intelligent, also an ESL speaker, though with perhaps somewhat less proficiency, who thought she needed to download the Instagram, Facebook and TikTok apps in order to see the links her “friends” sent her. (That most of those links seemed to me to be various forms of fearbait slop I considered to be beyond the scope of my legitimate ability to address. She’s a grown woman, can make her own choices, etc.; she’s just not conversant with the tacit conventions that are obvious to virtually all UI designers.)

    I spent ten or fifteen minutes with each of them, and most of that was reassuring them.
    : . |

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 7:24 PM

    An uncomfortable amount of anger in some of these replies. It’s my fault, and I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have licensed that anger by using the words “furious” or “rage.”

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:32 PM

    @aprilfollies @wtrmt @jessamyn The worst. Liquid Glass is a war crime. Fortunately the tasteless chucklefuck responsible has already been selected out…but so long as cosmetic differentiation outweighs solid unglamorous design for usability, there will be more such atrocities.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 5:05 PM

    @aprilfollies @wtrmt @adamgreenfield @jessamyn My eyesight is not that bad at age 63 but that 'glass' was so bad I couldn't read the time on lockscreen and it appears at 1.5 cm on my screen!

    I wanted to smack the person/s who thought that was a good idea. Mainly becasue after that update it just decided to default to that 'look'.

    Oh yea, as an aside; the removal of 'split screen' (side view) is still annoying me.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 12:59 PM

    @adamgreenfield Yeah, I'm always trying to explain things to my mum, often having to describe the shape of cryptic icons. The amount of time I've spent *only explaining how to do things in iOS Safari* is boggling.

    Every release adds a few more features, a few more settings, each serving one segment of the user base, none of whom can be disappointed by having those features removed.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 5:31 PM

    @philgyford @adamgreenfield I am using computers for more than 30 years and iPhones since 2008.

    I find the UX of Safari on iOS confusing, easy to accidentally use the wrong gesture, and just a general mess.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:01 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn Designing a good friendly UI is not easy. But there's lots of things that are not easy.

    The real question is whether or not it is a priority. If it's a priority, then the problem can be solved with sufficient money, effort, hires, etc.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 11:42 PM
    @isaackuo @adamgreenfield @jessamyn

    It's the feeling of "things just keep getting worse" that I find most striking. It's not like we're asking them to build a better moon rocket, we actually just want to go back to an earlier version where stuff made sense because they spent years getting it right.

    I stopped buying google hardware some time back because they keep changing he UI so much. My last two phones have been Chinese versions with Android under the hood and they've been rock solid. But the Chinese have a lot of respect for their elders you know :)
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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:09 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn I can totally picture how a lot of these decisions are made. You raise a real concern and it gets scoffed at by the privileged people in the room who are never without reliable broadband and the whole universe catering to their needs. Everything is about shipping a new thing in time to demo for investors. There's never any time to make it accessible to the people because that's just "nice to haves."

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:15 PM

    @thomasjwebb @jessamyn It’s less about economic privilege, I think, and more about similarly unquestioned existential privilege: never having to navigate a screen with type three sizes larger than default, not even being aware that at 25 you are who the culture is fundamentally *about*, being able to work confidently with abstraction, etc.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 9:17 PM

    @adamgreenfield @thomasjwebb @jessamyn "Type three sizes larger than default" is a very, very real problem. I'm more than passingly familiar with the iOS UI and have been since the UX was actually thoughtful. My mom uses precisely the same version of iOS I do on comparable hardware, though with the font size cranked up as far as it'll go.

    I can find exactly *nothing* in the interface of her phone when I try to help her / make changes / undo an inane default. Nothing. I have no idea what I'm even looking at. It might as well have been written in ancient runes and painted on the side of a UFO about to land. I have to reverse engineer the entire UI because while the text might be more readable the interface is decidedly not. Every interface convention is violated so hard it becomes incomprehensible.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 10:18 PM

    @jessamyn @majick @adamgreenfield yeah that drives me nuts because to me, the SEs are the right size for a phone and most phones are too big. This is getting into personal preference territory but I do think a lot of people have accessibility issues with larger phones. And this does relate to one of myriad blind spots/biases tech companies have. I have been blown off many times when mentioning something fucks up on smaller phones.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:09 PM

    @adamgreenfield
    Last year I tried to explain to a 70-year-old why creating a new message and creating a new email are two different icons on her Android phone. I also had to explain the number pad icon at least 7 times when we set up her phone and 3 times more the next time we met.

    @jessamyn

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:34 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn
    Remember when there used to be an "undo" option for everything? I pine for that.
    This was the whole theory -- everyone's going to be scared to use the computer if they can't undo freely and with certainty.
    I want it back so much, but design-for-undo is an idea that has to reach so deep into our technical stacks that I despair of it.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:36 PM

    @nonnihil @jessamyn I legit feel a hard undo button would address a whole lot of the worst issues. Unfortunately it wouldn’t do anything for someone who’s e.g. *just* clicked on the scam/malware link, but it’d help.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 1:41 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn
    Right, this is what I mean by it reaching too deep in the stack. We lost undo in part because we gained the internet, and you can't undo a network connection or unsend a packet.

    To design for undo would mean designing transactional network protocols plausibly guaranteeing that a remote end can and will undo. And that would be a _very_ different world -- you'd blow up half of HTTP, for instance: There is no web-scale undo.

    "Lose the web to gain undo" is not a tradeoff I think we can accept at the moment, although I cannot but ponder it.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:10 PM

    @adamgreenfield All the older people I do informal support for were quite comfortable with the “old” iOS, creeping featuritis is a real problem. And every year there’s more. I think if they could just have iPhone 5s they’d be ecstatic

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:41 PM

    @kmck
    Yes! “creeping featuritis is a real problem” 🔔
    Well described & definitely feels like a disease of modern times. ☹️

    #creepingFeaturitis

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 5:38 PM

    @kmck @adamgreenfield I relate! I'm in my mid-70s and I like my iPhone SE (third generation) — and I'm dealing with the latest rev of iOS, which made some things worse.

    But I was thinking recently about how, when I got my first iPhone many years ago, everything seemed so intuitive. I played with one in an Apple store before buying, and I could figure everything out! I was so impressed.

    I certainly wouldn't say that now.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 11:48 PM

    @kmck @adamgreenfield its interesting to me that things that do not need changing are changed when things that do need changing are not changed.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:23 PM

    @adamgreenfield

    Except that Instagram most overtly but very often Facebook do drive you to both their apps and at the very least opening an account, even if there's an intent that sends a link that might be coerced to open in a browser.

    Instagram has long earned opproprium for this app-centric pattern.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:07 PM

    @adamgreenfield I only use Android, and support 4 over 70 on Android.
    Why should I learn OS?
    Everyone is the best supporter on system he uses.
    So for Android users supporting OS.....

    PS
    Not mentioning the price range availability....
    For mid low end device.

    PPS
    In my case Samsung helps a lot, standardized!

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:12 PM

    @adamgreenfield one of the things I’ve noticed that makes it a lot harder for people to use a lot of android phones is that a lot of the android market is devices that are not super high spec and there’s an incredible delay between any gesture or tap you do and what actually happens. And this makes it very hard to ever learn how your phone works. It just feels like nothing happens and then random things happen.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:13 PM

    @sus so much this. which would be fine…if they had a feature set calibrated to the chipset driving it.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:14 PM

    @adamgreenfield not that folks would need amazing processors or whatever if we wrote software for phones that respected their hardware

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 6:10 PM

    @sus @adamgreenfield I've had Android phones for 15+years, as has my husband. Our adult child has an iPhone.

    I've not noticed any delays on the Android phones. Or random things happening.

    I spend as much time providing tech support to both of them for iPhone as I do for Android.

    Both operating systems have their own idiosyncrasies.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 6:47 PM

    @redcrew This absolutely isn't a problem for all android phones, but for the many folks with underpowered hardware relative to the os and apps on their phone, it is absolutely a problem.

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  • Aug 12, 2026, 9:36 PM

    @adamgreenfield There should be a non-reassignable, non-coverable, non-interruptable omnipresent button for "go back to the desktop/ home screen" so wherever in the menu tree you get lost, you can always start over.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 8:29 PM

    @adamgreenfield My grandparents, who are 87 and 91 respectively, have made a conscious choice to use a dumbphone for daily usage and only use a touchscreen UI for recreational purposes and non-critical comms.

    They like the Android UX but only to the extent of a toy. They probably have never seen an iphone, probably because I would hate to support the apple's walled garden for them.

    So even a Nokia cannot compete with the random brands that hit the UX jackpot for the elders:

    Image attached toot
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  • Aug 12, 2026, 12:23 AM

    @adamgreenfield Based on experience with my 95-year old mother, and some 80-year old friends...the best phone for really old people is a flip phone. No smart capabilities, button keyboard, answer the phone by opening it up.

    But my mother still wouldn't plug it in, so it was always dead.

    I guess the best phone for a number of people is Ye Olde Land Line phone. At least they always had power.

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  • Aug 12, 2026, 11:03 AM

    @dancingtreefrog @adamgreenfield

    Yeah, the button keyboard is important. Older people often lose their dexterity and physically can't make the gestures that touchscreens demand. That locks them out of smartphone use even if they still have the eyesight and the mental flexibility for it. There are assistive keyboards for computers, but I've not seen anything similar for phones and tablets.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:18 PM

    @adamgreenfield I used to work in IT support, AND support a usability research centre, so I empathise deeply with you. At least once a week I'm confronted with "Fifteen years [later] things have only gotten worse." How do we allow it

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 6:58 PM

    @danstowell @adamgreenfield Because users blame themselves for not being able to work out how to use a UI rather than blaming the designers who should have known better and made things easier.

    I had the "misfortune" to cut my computing teeth on the most elegant UI I have ever used, Acorn's RISC OS.

    I curse and cuss all UI/UX designers that have followed who all seem to have lacked any genuinely new ideas or insights as to how things can be made easier.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:21 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn

    A neighbor i try to keep track of asked for help with his TV. He is 71 and mostly homebound. It keeps popping up this warning, he says.

    Its a samsung smart tv. Samsung was pushing an update to its tv os.

    Lets just let it update i tell him. It will be ok.

    It was not ok. UI totally changed. Nothing works like it did, shit autoplays and there are sneaky advertisements mixed in with the regular channels. Horrible and confusing and distressing for me and my neighbor.

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  • Aug 12, 2026, 7:08 AM

    @notyourfanboy Think of the most dysfunctional pieces of rubbish you can find, and there you'll almost invariably find the advertising industry. The screenshots are so they can figure out what ads you're watching.

    They can't record direct from your eyeballs. Yet.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:47 PM

    @adamgreenfield I’m not old, I’m a proficient English speaker and I work on software 40 hours a week for a living. I STILL struggle with UI/UX every single day. So many terrible designs have creeped into a majority of software and it’s only accelerated further by “vibe-coded re-designs”. Change for the sake of change is one of the most terrible afflictions of the modern world.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:30 PM

    @skatecloud
    So glad to read what you wrote… so it’s not only me… or any of the others described in this thread. 🙂
    And this, your comment on change, resonates 🔔 so loud & clear: “Change for the sake of change is one of the most terrible afflictions of the modern world.” 👍🙏🏻

    #changeForTheSakeOfChange

    @adamgreenfield

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  • Edgeczarbucks@m.ai6yr.org
    Aug 11, 2026, 2:48 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn

    I appreciate your post so much, my elder sister has a distinct inferiority complex about anything to do with computers or phones, and is convinced that everything she doesn't understand is her fault.

    Whether UI or just sop, if anything doesn't go as expected, "she" has done something wrong.

    It's why I always tell her when Apple mail begins doing some crazy damned thing, and I say I guess I'll just live with it for a couple of weeks, until someone reboots that server... and the issue is resolved. I keep hoping that will give her a different perspective.

    Lovely that you help your relatives, neighbors and friends, I hope when everything is cranial implants that the younguns at that time will help me, too.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 2:51 PM

    @czarbucks Ha! I volunteer at a local foodbank one day a week, and my little tech clinic is “all part of the service,” as we say. (I’m trying to ease it from a charitable model to more of a mutual-aid paradigm, but it’s based in a church that supplies about a third of the volunteers, so…not easy.)

    Feel free to show your sister this post! She’s not alone, and should never have to feel like she is.

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  • Aug 11, 2026, 3:00 PM

    @adamgreenfield @jessamyn Yeah what is it with UIs getting constantly redesigned? Hot keys losing/changing their meanings, familiar menus gone, hidden who knows where. This happens with every product, not just phones. Consistency is for boomers or something? It's maddening.

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