Why Some Old People Struggle With Tech
I spent some time trying to help an elderly lady switch from an expensive land line to a cheap cell phone and got a few insights into why some older people have a hard time with tech.
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
All Buttons Are Not Created Equal
The buttons that people over eighty are familiar with are very different from the ones we use in tech today. Older people’s life experience is with buttons on elevators, car radios, blenders, crosswalks, manual typewriters, adding machines, and the like. They have spent their lives pressing HARD and LONG on mechanical buttons.
Ask your average over-eighty person to press a button and they will mash it down and hold it down for at least half a second because that’s what they’ve done to buttons their entire life.
Show them an icon-filled flip-phone screen and ask them to press the up-down-left-right buttons to navigate the highlight to a particular icon and they will jam down the button and zoom past their destination.
The concepts of “gentle” and “brief” are not in their button-pressing vocabulary.
Even entering numbers on a flip-phone keypad can be a challenge. They may want to enter “408” but they’re likely to see “44444” flash on the screen before they give up in frustration.
The idea of gently, briefly, pressing a button is alien to them and not that easy to learn after a lifetime of doing things differently.
Tapping Is A Bridge Too Far
If the concept of briefly and gently pressing a mechanical button is difficult, the ability to briefly and gently tap an on-screen icon is often a bridge too far. They will either jam their finger on the icon and hold it or they will fearfully jab at the screen as if the maneuver might randomly cause the device to burst into flames.
Again, this is not a trivial skill for them to master.
Text Not Icons
For most of their lives older people have gotten their instructions via text — Flammable, Danger, Employees Only, High Voltage, Exit, Elevator, Drive, High, Low, Stop, Off, On, etc.
A tiny picture of a telephone handset or a gear or three parallel lines, or a bunch of squares in a Tic-Tac-Toe grid are not only meaningless for them, the entire concept of memorizing the relationship of abstract pictures to text instead of reading the text directly is alien and frustrating.
“What is that picture? A trash can? It doesn’t look like a trash can. OK, it’s a trash can, but what does it mean? Delete? What’s that mean?”
Visual Selection Is A Foreign Concept
All their lives they have operated machinery by direct, mechanical selection. They moved a lever until a physical pointer stopped on “D” for “Drive.” They pressed a switch and the mixer spun or the electric knife whirred.
The idea that you’re supposed to do something by pressing buttons that cause one particular picture to turn a different color or brightness instead of physically moving a mechanical pointer to a number or a word is not intuitive for them.
Yes, they can see that the little picture of a phone receiver is bright now and after you press a button the outline of a human head is bright and after another press of the button the picture of a gear or a wrench is bright, but the flickering colors don’t intuitively mean “If you press some other button when this picture is this color then whatever this picture stands for will happen.”
They’ve spent their lives physically selecting the state of a machine, a tactile operation. Identifying a machine’s setting by a change in the visual brightness or color of some incomprehensible little picture is often a difficult concept to grasp.
Virtual Controls Are A Long Step Beyond Physical Controls
They understand physically turning a knob all the way to one side or the other to make something respectively hot or cold, loud or soft. It’s a direct, immediate feedback from a mechanical motion.
They have no experience with linking the movement of a finger across a picture, to a picture of a glowing line growing longer or shorter, to the result of sound getting louder or softer.
That’s three steps: visual and tactile — finger movement over the screen’s volume icon; Visual — line gets longer; aural — sound gets louder, that all have to be intellectually connected together instead of two steps, mechanical — twist knob; aural — sound gets louder.
For some of them that’s one step too far.
“Select Then Act” Is A Foreign Concept
For most of us the concept of “select something, then act” is second nature — select a block of text, then delete it or boldface it or whatever. Select Contacts — press OK, select John Smith from a list of names — press OK, then press OK again to make a call to John Smith.
Enter a number. Then press “Send” to call the number. Easy-peasy.
For older people “select then act” is a foreign concept. Picture an old-style desk phone wired to the wall. You make a call by entering the numbers. Period. There is no second “send” step. For most of their lives they just entered the numbers and the phone made the call.
They put their car into Drive and it immediately started to creep forward. They didn’t select Drive, then select Go, then press on the gas.
If they were typing a letter and they wanted to underline something they moved the carriage back, then hit the underline key several times.
They never experienced the concept of “Select something with one button then press a different button to perform an action on what you selected.”
So, when you tell them that to dial a number they first have to enter it and then press a different button to send it, that’s a new concept.
Navigate An Hierarchical List Is A Foreign Concept
We are all used to menus leading to sub-menus, leading to sub-sub-menus, but older people aren’t.
Their lives were spent in direct selection of tasks. You turn on the machine and it works. You set the slider on the toaster to 5 and lower the bread. You press the “puree” button on the blender and it immediately whips. One and done.
But not with tech. Tech is all about hierarchical menus.
To call a saved number from a flip-phone
- They first have to press the button that will activate the “Apps” icon on the main screen, then
- They have to press the left-right-up-down buttons to highlight the Contact icon on the apps menu screen, then
- They have to press OK to actually bring up the list of contacts, then
- They have to press the up-down buttons to select the name they want from the Contacts list, then
- They have to press the OK button, to move that name to the call screen, then
- They have to press the OK button again to actually make the call to that person.
To do one thing that they expect to be able to do by just pressing one button, instead they have to 1) Select Tools, then press the Do It (OK) button; 2) Select Contracts, then press the Do It (OK) button; 3) Select Name, then press the Do It (OK) button; 4) then Press the OK button to actually make the call.
Too many steps with too many buttons for them to figure out and keep straight compared with how they’ve operated machines their entire previous life.
Mapping An Icon To A Button Doesn’t Compute
The flip-phone convention is that the icon on the bottom left of the screen maps to the button just below it on the top left of the keypad; the icon in the bottom center maps to the button on the upper center, and so forth. That seems simple to us, but not to older people.
They understand that a button with the word “Off” on it will turn a machine off. The idea that one button can do many different things depending on a changing picture half an inch away is hard for them to grasp.
The idea that there is a connection between a tiny picture on a screen and the action that will be generated by pressing a button some distance away is a mental connection they are not used to making.
Now this button will turn the phone off, but a minute ago this button would bring up a menu, and before that this same button would do something else is outside of their life experience.
In their world the “Off” button was always the Off button, period, and it probably had the word “Off” printed on it or right below it.
Show an old person a flip-phone screen and tell them, “This picture up here on the screen maps to this button down here on the keypad. See, this is a picture of a telephone handset so you press this button if you want to dial a call” and you are likely to get a blank stare.
Summary
Many old people lack the physical skills to press buttons or tap screens in a way that will get them the desired results.
The concepts of
- Action choices identified by pictures whose meaning must be memorized instead of read
- Allocation of different functions to virtual buttons instead one function to one physical button
- Selection of a virtual button identified by changes in color and brightness instead of pressing a physical button
- Pressing a button to select one menu choice then pressing another button to do something with that menu choice instead of merely pressing a button to immediately perform one specific action
are all contrary to the life experiences of many older people.
It’s not that they are stupid. It’s not that they cannot reason. It’s not that they cannot memorize.
The problem is that we are asking them to discard a lifetime of experience of how things work and completely change their mental wiring.
That’s a big ask.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
