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How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives
Lauren Weinstein writes: A couple of months ago, in "Seeking Anecdotes Regarding 'Older' Persons' Use of Web Services," I asked for stories and comments regarding experiences that older users have had with modern Web systems, with an emphasis on possible problems and frustrations. I purposely did not define "older" — with the result that responses arrived from users (or regarding users) self-identifying as ages ranging from their 30s to well into their 90s (suggesting that "older" is largely a point of view rather than an absolute). Before I began the survey I had some preconceived notions of how the results would appear. Some of these were proven correct, but overall the responses also contained many surprises, often both depressing and tragic in scope. The frustration of caregivers in these contexts was palpable. They'd teach an older user how to use a key service like Web-based mail to communicate with their loved ones, only to discover that a sudden UI change caused them to give up in frustration and not want to try again. When the caregiver isn't local the situation is even worse. While remote access software has proven a great boon in such situations, they're often too complex for the user to set up or fix by themselves when something goes wrong, remaining cut off until the caregiver is back in their physical presence.
Having worked in user support and network administration for multiple industries, I can imagine the frustration for caregivers when even the remote support software is just too confusing for the user.
For instance, many of the most popular remote support services require the end user to jump through multiple hoops that may include surfing to a particular web address (which they invariably type into Google or Yahoo instead of the address bar), entering a series of digits they swear they typed correctly (but often haven't and are too stubborn to re-read what they typed), then watch the screen for browser interaction prompts (which may be reasonable-sized prominent pop-up dialogs, but are more often either a noticeable thin yellow bar at the top or bottom of the browser window, or even worse, a pop-up window that somehow ended up as a pop-under, even though that's not how it is supposed to be), then click only the buttons that answer in the affirmative. All of this assumes the user's browser even works correctly.
Some days, it seems that even the young-uns can't figure out how to allow a remote support session.
I do know there are a few less-complicated remote support products, but they are few and far between, do not seem to be popular enough to be in common use in these scenarios, and often have more security issues than the services I mention above.
Much of the remote support problem is the catch-22 of browser security. If you don't secure the browser more, the customer is at risk. If you do secure the browser more, the customer's experience is further complicated.
There are those who would say "just educate the user". These are the people who do not understand their fellow humans and the limitations different types of learner and different generational barriers.
So, what about writing down instructions ahead of time? That gets into what the original post discussed; The interface will inevitably change, either for the browser or for the remote support service.
I'm not saying I think there is a fix. I don't. I do think it is something that might could be solved if the industry becomes more aware of the Human Interface Design problem it has.
The interfaces do suck. I can help out my mother, not because I'm smarter, but because I've learned to deal with the idiocy that's out there and understand some of the obtuse terms being used. I deal with crappy stuff all day long, she doesn't.
Most recent example: her email lost her address book and send buttons. Basically that toolbar vanished. Don't know how it happened, probably some obscure key sequence she hit by mistake. So I have to go to the menu (this being Thunderbird it hasn't yet removed menus in the asinine way that Firefox did), find the way to change the view, look at which toolbars are active, click on "message" in my guess that these buttons were on the message toolbar and not the mail toolbar. Not hard but completely obtuse to someone not versed in how UIs are done.
Next problem in the same phone call: it wasn't showing all her email. 15 unread messages that it didn't seem to display or download. This one had me stumped actually for a bit. Turns out she had accidentally clicked on one of the filtering buttons at the top of the list. It is not at all obvious what has happened, or what these buttons do. But click on one and it only shows messages that match its filter (she had clicked the one to show only messages from those in her address book). Now if there should be ANY menu bar that should have to option to be disabled, it is that completely optional one, not the one containing the button to let you send a message.
To really make this hard, Mozilla is changing their UI all the time, without warning, without consulting with users, with devs thinking they know what's best for the entire world. Leave the UI alone, and stop being actively hostile to the user.
Thankfully, I've got TeamViewer which makes remote control easy. I recommend it. You need the other end to have broadband though or it'd be too slow.