"A lot of our technology is bad at humans" - the older the human the worse it gets

 

Many thanks to Chuck Nyren for telling me about these two items.

The video is titled : 2016 Interaction Design Today, short documentary

Much of the video illustrates, unintentionally, why designers get it so wrong. Terms like pretentious, elitist and self-satisfied come to mind.

The lady who talks at (3.28) makes a lot of sense. I paraphrase her comments.

We are a long way from doing the basics well... my profession keeps getting the rudimentary things wrong ... how can we increase the level of hygiene to get the basic stuff right .... to satisfy the full range of people that need to use the things that we are designing ..... once we have done that we can worry about "delighting" people..

Amazingly, the video makes no mention about the challenges created to product and process design caused by the ageing of consumers. This should be at the top of the list of challenges facing all types of design.

Chuck also sent me an article from the Washington Post : Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

This is a good summary of the issues with so many digital interfaces, even those from Apple.

But let's not get fixated with product design. Even if you get that 100% right, but fail to get the other 100+ touchpoints in the customer journey to be equally age-friendly, then you fail. More accurately you either lose or alienate your customers.

There is another way that involves using the AF Tool to evaluate the customer journey through the prism of physiological ageing. This tool forces you to consider all aspects of how customer related to your organisation.  Dick Stroud