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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the You-May-Be-Younger,-But-I-Have-Better-Insurance dept.

(Disclaimer: I wrote the article Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users but suspect that many Soylentils will find it useful.)

A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Web designers need to understand what older users need and why it's not enough to just say, "I can read it, so what's the problem?"

If you're my age you have no doubt run into more than a few web sites that are just plain useless, either because you can't read the text, or because they were designed using assumptions that those of us over forty years of age don't find useful. Whether it's our need for high contrast text, or our preference for actual words and paragraphs over video, the needs of older users often get ignored.

We are the generation that invented and grew up with personal computers. It's absurd to suggest that we are less capable of using technology. In other words, you can't complain about old people not understanding tech, and then also complain that they've taken over Facebook and Twitter. Besides, we also usually have lots more disposable income, so catering to our needs is good for business.


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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday November 24 2019, @05:11AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday November 24 2019, @05:11AM (#924101) Journal

    I think we've all probably gone to youtube to learn how to do something (for me, plumbing -- I've saved many thousands of dollars) and it obviously has its place, but it seems the modern information aesthetic is to glom everything together. I quit using Gmail years ago because it was so hard to use because of that glomming. In recent versions of OSX, when you open finder it doesn't default to your user folder anymore, but rather to some massive list of everything on your machine -- it just adds a step I have move around to do what I know what I want to do. I don't treat my files like I'm going window shopping -- I want a specific thing and the quickest way to get there. When I'm on a hard search for something I misplaced, for all of the computing resources apple wastes on spotlight etc, the fastest way to get there for me usually, is to open terminal and type find ~ | grep -i somethingOrOther.

    Doing a web search would be so much better if the results were less of a random blob and much more segregated: text, audio, pictures, video, news (DDG actually does a relatively good job of this as mentioned above). I think it is rare to not know whether you want an article or a video, so throwing up videos when you are looking to order a part is waste, just like throwing up parts lists when you want to see an example before you wade into fixing your borkenDoDad.

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