My mother struggles with her iPad. I presume Apple does usability and discoverability studies with seniors, but clearly they ignore the results. Usability was a sacred goal back in the HIG golden days, but now is sacrificed.
If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
* Lack of scroll indicators. If you don’t know you have to scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn’t have to be scrollbars, but there must be some visible indication and/or control so that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious and discoverable.
* iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I don’t use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me. Horrific UX.
* Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the viewport even retain keyboard focus?
* <input type=number> completely broken. I have watched my mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails. Same with $. I’ve experienced this as a developer - it is just sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but input.value == "" which is fucked.
* auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs. And doesn’t know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just leave the chrome visible please.
* Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things, but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
* The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn. Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi, bluetooth).
There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious and less “pretty”.
Maybe they could call it “beginners” mode. Like the opposite of a “pro” model or something.
While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs as their only job?
If they had a geriatric mode that concentrated on functional UI over form, I would probably use it myself. Here are the most obvious issues (some are Safari specific):
* Lack of scroll indicators. If you don’t know you have to scroll, then you are screwed. It doesn’t have to be scrollbars, but there must be some visible indication and/or control so that the need for scrolling up or down in particular is obvious and discoverable.
* iPad multiple windows. The usability of this is completely broken. I would also love to disable it for myself, because I don’t use multi-tasking and the UI only ever frustrates me. Horrific UX.
* Keyboard focus indication. Watching your mum type into a field, scroll, and not realise the keyboard focus is not where she expects is hella frustrating. Should a field outside the viewport even retain keyboard focus?
* <input type=number> completely broken. I have watched my mother type in a number using a comma (because other numbers on the page were displayed with commas) and the UI silently fails. Same with $. I’ve experienced this as a developer - it is just sooooo broken because the field accepts invalid characters but input.value == "" which is fucked.
* auto-hiding the tab bar in Safari. Mum opens a hundred tabs. And doesn’t know about the rest of the Safari toolbar. Just leave the chrome visible please.
* Hard to Undo. I remember how fucking magical undo was, and still is. Undo is not accessible (although admittedly far far worse on Android). Implicit save is fantastic for most things, but frightening for some settings. System confirmation modals as a workaround are seriously fucking nasty.
* The top-right swipe system menu is difficult to learn. Especially for system modal changes (rotation lock, wifi, bluetooth).
There are so many complicated things on the iPad that I need to teach my mother, just like Windows of yore. Some of those issues can easily be fixed, if the UI were to be more obvious and less “pretty”.
Maybe they could call it “beginners” mode. Like the opposite of a “pro” model or something.
While I am being a whinging Englishman, they could fix some bugs too. 4 major iPadOS versions, and I still run into the same fucking bugs every day. I mean, the hardware is great, but why do the same bugs persist forever? Obvious bugs, with many appearing to be very shallow. Maybe hire some devs to fix bugs as their only job?