<story><title>How Betty, Who Is 89, Gets Her News</title><url>http://melodykramer.github.io/how-betty-who-is-89-gets-her-news/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbesto</author><text>I recently watched a 65 year old woman use an iPad for the first time. One thing I noticed right away about her interaction was she struggled to realize that many blue text words were actually buttons (see the Send button in this screenshot[0]). IMO, this has been one of the biggest design failures of recent Apple software.&lt;p&gt;[0] - &lt;a href=&quot;http://313e5987718b346aaf83-f5e825270f29a84f7881423410384342.r78.cf1.rackcdn.com/1401762828-messages_hero.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;313e5987718b346aaf83-f5e825270f29a84f7881423410384342...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcthompson</author><text>Apparently the relevant design&amp;#x2F;usability term is &amp;quot;affordances&amp;quot;, which are the &amp;quot;sensory characteristics [of an object that] intuitively imply its functionality and use&amp;quot;[1]. Affordances in UI design have evidently gone out of style, which effectively means that people are just expected to learn the arbitrary (and ever-changing) rules of how to interacting with computers (and other computing devices), instead of having the computing devices cater to how people expect them to work.&lt;p&gt;I think this also leads back to the idea that the touchscreen as a user interface is absolutely awful in every way except for the one huge advantage of its reconfigurability. (I forget the source for this, but there&amp;#x27;s a specific article I&amp;#x27;m thinking of.)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/affordance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usabilityfirst.com&amp;#x2F;glossary&amp;#x2F;affordance&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How Betty, Who Is 89, Gets Her News</title><url>http://melodykramer.github.io/how-betty-who-is-89-gets-her-news/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbesto</author><text>I recently watched a 65 year old woman use an iPad for the first time. One thing I noticed right away about her interaction was she struggled to realize that many blue text words were actually buttons (see the Send button in this screenshot[0]). IMO, this has been one of the biggest design failures of recent Apple software.&lt;p&gt;[0] - &lt;a href=&quot;http://313e5987718b346aaf83-f5e825270f29a84f7881423410384342.r78.cf1.rackcdn.com/1401762828-messages_hero.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;313e5987718b346aaf83-f5e825270f29a84f7881423410384342...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flatline</author><text>When my daughter was two and a half she could use the iPad pretty efficiently, because it was always pretty obvious where you should click. At nearly four she now struggles to click things or to even know what to click. It&amp;#x27;s a terrible regression for a debatably minor improvement in overall appaearance.</text></comment>