This person's needs are simple: email and text editing. But going away from her Windows XP / Outlook Express failed: she felt lost. And within this technology hole, not much can be done because it's amazingly un-hackable. Everything is designed for people who see things: popups of all kinds, menus, convoluted placements. I gave her a magnifier and voice synthesis. Better than nothing but very inadequate to her needs. Even closing a window is still a pain for her.
Dream: And yet I know her computer could manage her phone book and compose numbers for her, for instance. And so many other things that could lighten her daily life can be envisioned. Even play scrabble or other games she enjoys would be better on a speaking computer, and more enjoyable with online opponents.
Much could be done, even from a startup point of view. But for now I'm running out of hope especially because it's so hard to engage old people to new things.
My plan is the following:
Buy a touch tablet with a one button design (not necessarily an iPad although that would probably be a good bet)
This is to minimize abstraction (touch the item instead of using the mouse)
And to minimize choice (if anything goes wrong you can always click on the big button in the bottom) It's the panic button.
Throw pictures of her grandson and family on it and show her how she can always have those with her. That way she will get an infinity towards the machine because it now consist of familiar faces and she loves to look at her grandson.
Preload a bunch of sites that I know she is going to use a lot. One of them is going to be a picture site that will have regularly updated pictures.
Send her an email every-time it's updated. Send her an SMS to tell her they are there.
Don't know if it's going to work, but I am looking forward to the experiment :)
Showing her high resolution pictures and videos of my first newborn little girl via email got her attention and a load of incitament to learn at least how to email/surf.
Her internet provider also sends her an SMS automatically when she get's an email, and then she rush to the computer to fire it up and read the mail to check out the pictures.
On a downside I now recieve nagging emails like "It was long ago I got pictures of my grandchild!" ;)
Just because our parents didn't grow up with computers it doesn't mean that they aren't able to grasp computing as a concept and need to be treated like children. I'm sorry, that's how I read your approach: She needs pictures on the tablet to create emotional attachment? Having pictures on there will somehow make her forget that it's just a machine?
Of course there's a lot we can do to limit the avalanche of buttons and options that has come to dominate computing, and we should (and we are, and that's not just targeting the elderly). But these people has navigated life for decades, and just because it's on a computer, and they might need some hand-holding to get started, it isn't rocket science..
He had always been a fan of crosswords, and for a while my mother had been bringing over hand-copied crossword puzzles that she had enlarged to a point where he could see them. He also was having a hard time being able to see his watch anymore, but his hearing was too hard for him to make out what came out of those "talking" watches.
We had gotten him a 47" HDTV a year ago, and for a long time he was overjoyed by how much more of it he could see. I never would've thought to connect a Flip camcorder to his TV and see if it helped him read much, put his arm under it to see the watch, or work a crossword puzzle.
Impressive!
