“... give the user a pleasant and great experience without new shocks to their existing habits.”
Now you just nailed a serious problem that I’ve been coming across since Windows 8 came out.
I use Windows 7 on my laptop and that’s what my mom had. She is technologically illiterate and it has been a serious struggle to get her on board. (Terms like ‘mouse’ and ‘desktop’ are nonstarters for her.)
With every FREAKING change to technology, she gets farther behind. Right now, she has no email because her live account did security updates months ago and she couldn’t navigate that. She can’t sign up for a NEW freaking account because she cannot understand the ‘needs two symbols, two letters, two numbers, and the blood of a virgin’ BS and she cannot get it over the phone. (We’re on opposite sides of the continent, so I can only help her over the phone.)
As security becomes more complicated, technology is leaving a MASSIVE group behind. I intentionally didn’t upgrade to Windows 8 because there would be no way for me to mirror her movements of we were using different OS.
The horrible thing is that now she needs a new computer and all she has available is Windows 8 and I don’t have it to help her. So she has a sputtering computer (that MIGHT actually work fine if she would trust me and actually RESTART it... she STILL believes that she’s restarted it by turning the monitor off and on... *sigh*)
Worse - I’m not a total moron and each leap is starting to leave me behind. In about ten years, I’ll be just as confused as she is now.
These tech-heads simply cannot understand that the low-level user (most of us) are simply not that invested. We need a SIMPLE, CONSISTENT user-interface that we can rely on for the long run.
Dammit.
Whoever invents the Jitterbug OS for seniors will be rich.
I think I should send your post to my neighbor who works for Microsoft. You really describe well the reality people face especially seniors. My mother is 84 and uses a mac and it’s still very frustrating.