Is macOS truly the holy grail UX for older people?
My mother is 65+ years old and loves everything Apple, but whenever I need to touch her computer I find myself questioning that choice.
The degree to which Apple abstract things from the user enables the most absurd behaviors. macOS gives little indication about which programs are open, and the red x on the top left corner just closes windows, not apps. Because the session persistence is so robust, the consequence is that my mother's Macbook Air keeps 12+ programs and their states open at all times literally for months. Every time she comes over from another continent, I close a bunch of stuff and get her an instant performance boost. Plus, she's never really sure if a program is open or not.
The concept of (work)Spaces, as well as the launchpad, spotlight, or even how Finder really works is beyond her. Because of her over-reliance on the dock, she never enabled autohiding, so her screen real state is always crowded.
Folders are entirely immaterial for her. Everything goes to "Downloads" with no organization whatsoever, and she's always looking for stuff "manually" by reading the filenames.
Her machine is running Mojave, and right now I can only see that finder displays two "Libraries": Documents and Downloads. Linux and Windows have Videos, Downloads, Music, etc. Those are easy to make sense of. What's the supposed Mac alternative? Buy stuff on iTunes. Well, if something is not on Amazon Video or Netflix my mother is a pirate like me (hehe), so she never made sense of it and I truly despise using iTunes for doing anything at all. She also downloads a bunch of media related to her job.
I'm not saying macOS is bad, I'm just asking: is it really the best choice for non-technical older people?
I can rant about bizarre Apple decisions for hours but... UX? "For older people"? Where on earth would you find something superior? Any bit of confusion you can manage to conjure on macOS has an at least equally confusing alternative on Windows (this is putting it mildly: Windows is often stressing me out when I try to find shit). Mentioning Linux distros and UX in the same sentence feels like an oxymoron (I'm sorry but I'm imagining telling my mom to "just go into terminal" over the phone and I'm in cold sweat). Just the mere prospect of changing operating systems is probably a nightmare for her.
Why not just show her a) how to close programs and b) how to find the Documents folder? If that is out of reach, what are the hopes of finding something simpler elsewhere (if there were louder indications that programs are open, she'd just have more clutter on the screen and would still keep them open)?
What could also help is to tell her to reboot once in a while and maybe put some important sub-folders into the Finder sidebar? I'll also add that I had great results from forcing my parents to learn how to perform basic file operations (make a new folder, move a file, copy-paste and generally navigating Explorer – yea, they're on Windows). Invest an afternoon, make tea or something, put great effort into mustering patience and just don't take "I'll never learn computers!" for an answer.
OK, iTunes is bad, but I've never had to read documentation to figure out how to use it. I can't say the same about any terminal apps that do anything even remotely complicated.
All of this seems to be a issue with the chosen defaults, rather than the actual OS design. Don't get me wrong, defaults are important, but a lot of things you mentioned are one-click checkbox settings: showing your home directory at the top of the sidebar, your root drive on the desktop, keeping multiple workspaces ordered, locking apps to specific workspaces, etc.
I don't see the OS discouraging folder structure, either - even if you don't navigate to the home directory, you can have an organised hierarchy starting from the desktop, and on the other hand people can still end up with an all-in-one-place file dump even in their home directory. The choice of how to organise (or not) seems like it's solely on the user there.
App store and "security" settings, I'm 100% with you. They're frustrating and anticompetitive, and I've posted a few times here about how much I fear them tightening that into an iOS style lock in.
So, I tried to teach my grandfather to use macOS a few years ago. It made me realize how unoptimized the desktop metaphor is and how inconsistent various things are. I’m used to it, but coming from his perspective, things were too distracting and inconsistent and he couldn’t get comfortable enough in the few hours of time I had to teach him. iOS was much better, but only when we stuck to Apple’s apps, and Mail was the most difficult.
In my experience, the memory management in macOS is so good that this is fine. I’m pretty sure Apple optimizes for this user behavior. I run my macs for months without quitting apps or rebooting and I notice no perceptible performance issues. Apps that are not used get put into a backgrounded state that uses hardly any resources. The only app I regularly need to quit is Chrome (which I only use on my work machine).
Using Terminal, Safari, TextMate, Transmission, TV, Music, Reeder, Mail, Alfred and a half dozen other apps on any given session, and leaving them open, for months, works totally fine for me on 5 year old iMac. My parents, though they use different applications than me, also have similar usage and patterns. My father is particularly egregious with browser windows, sometimes opening nearly 100 windows. He finds this more convenient than using bookmarks somehow. In any case, he does this and since the window processes get suspended when he hasn’t touched them in a while, macOS let’s him get away with this.
My mother uses this pattern, too. I’ve tried to dissuade her to no avail. It doesn’t seem to bother her though. She is very meticulous about organizing her photos in Dropbox, but random files she downloads? They just pile up in her Downloads directory.
Basically, macOS is workable for tech illiterate folks who are accustomed to it, because it is highly optimized for the use case where users don’t manually manage anything, such as application state or moving files around after downloading them. Apple doesn’t expect much from the user. You can just leave apps open, or find everything in a flat directory structure with Spotlight, or use the “Recently opened” list within in apps, and this will work for most people. Even Time Machine is basically set it and forget it. For those who have no experience using tech at all, I think macOS is too overwhelming and inconsistent to recommend, though.
No, but ipadOS is. I recently gave my mom an ipad and she was all over it. IpadOS handles all that stuff fir the user. So if all you after is web, email, music and pictures it’s hard to beat.
Depends, for my mom when she had a mac it was terrible for her because she didn't really have support, I know linux and I know windows, best I could do for her on her Mac and iPhone is google stuff for her.
The best was a Chromebook because it had everything she needed, everything was backed up with no effort on her part, and since she's still a substitute teacher she has access to their IT department and kids that are familiar with the device as that's what they use.
When I use a mac or ios I honestly don't find their UIUX significantly more intuitive than Windows or Linux or Android. It's got its own learning curves and I often bump up against stuff that doesn't work the way I expect it to because of my experience in the other operating systems.
The best UI / UX for older people is actually iPad OS right now.
Yes, MacOS is difficult and abstract, when compared to a smartphone. But of the available desktop interfaces it’s quite easily the simplest desktop UI and UX that’s fully featured (not a glorified browser like Chrome OS).
But every grandparent or old relative that I’ve been able to open up the delight of technology toward, has enjoyed the iPad because it made accessing email, internet, and video calls much much easier.
It’s also much harder to somehow break or compromise an iPad with unwarranted / unwanted software.
I don't want to have this discussion for the nth time on tildes, but this is a PSA that millions upon millions of software developers, technically minded folk, graphic designers, video editors, college students, and yes, older people, use macOS without frustration and issue to go about our lives and act as a tool in our toolbox.
Reporting in as a web dev who uses a mac. The big draw for me was that it was an OS that stayed the hell out of my way (unlike Windows), curbed my habit of endless tinkering/customizing (which, believe it or not, was becoming a problem for me), and supported MS/Adobe software natively (unlike Linux). Like you said, it's just a tool in my toolbox. After 15+ years of going back and forth between Windows and Linux I feel like macOS is the perfect blend of the two for me and my needs.
I agree with your comment entirely but this part made me a bit sad. I've been using Macs since 1988 and they used to allow for way more interface customizing. We used to have utilities like Kaleidoscope that enabled deep customization of system UI elements. There was a thriving artist community developing robust catalogs of icons, sound sets, and screensavers. Nowadays you can't even change your system font. You get a couple dock placement options and accent colors, and with all of the really interesting mod abilities locked out by SIP, the customization culture has all but dried up. Even if you disable SIP, there's not enough community support to present many options today.
Honestly custom UIs were a real abomination back in the day, but they were our abomination. I miss the freedom to tinker, for good or for ill. I miss swapping between 30 SoundJam MP skins and tweaking application icons in ResEdit. I can only imagine what things would be like if we could still do this stuff on our Macs now that we have retina displays and GPUs.
I'm grateful that some avenues for customization still exist. iTerm 2 and powerline-shell have breathed new life into my CLI experience. (Not to mention Homebrew, but that's a different sort of customization). BetterTouchTool is also an ESSENTIAL part of the modern Mac personalization scene. Honorable mention to Firefox, which allows for some fantastic depth of customization too.
I think @vegai was answering this question in the affirmative, that it is good for older people, technical younger people, and many others.
Uh WTF... you just completely misquoted what @vegai said and made it seem as if they meant the opposite of what they actually did. "I think it pretty easily is" was not in response to "I'm not saying macOS is bad", it was in response to "is it really the best choice for non-technical older people?" Vegai was saying that it is the best choice for non-technical people, and also technical younger people and everything in between.
Whoops, apologies to @vegai, I read it completely the other way around for some reason. Derp.
I'm not trying to argue Windows and Linux are necessarily better. I'm asking: "does it deserve to be regarded as the holy grail UX for older people?".
From reading your post: there's a difference between UX and workflow. It seems like most of what you're describing relates more to your mother's choice of the latter. The two aren't unrelated but there's something of an "you can lead a horse to water" issue with UX: if somebody insists on using a suboptimal workflow then you can't really help them.
MacOS isn't the "holy grail" or the "final word" on UX design for older people, nothing is if you want to be literal. But in terms of what's on offer Apple UX's pros and cons generally make it the more favorable choice for non-technically inclined people. The visual design tends to be consistent, things are generally in the same places and perform the same actions. Computational performance is generally good and consistent, it doesn't require too much complicated maintenance, and it doesn't let you accidentally brick your system in most cases. This is only part of the picture but it's generally why Mac is recommended for the less digitally literate.
To folders, I guess?
Mac uses folders too?
Yes, of course. It’s a Unix system. I’m referring to the user interface.
Barring third-party meddling Mac generally uses folders the same way most operating systems do. Including having things like Music in the finder sidebar. Whether or not any computer has that set up individually is a different question.
The
/Users/mrbig/folder will haveDesktop,Documents,Downloads,Movies,Music,Pictures, andPublicon a fresh install, and I think most of those are also added to the Finder's sidebar by default.I can assure you they are not shown in Finder by default.
Interesting - in that case, it might be helpful to add them next time you have access to the machine. There are checkboxes in Finder->Preferences->Sidebar.
It's because they expect you to dive into iCloud. Once you set that up, it adds an iCloud category in Finder with Desktop and Documents folders. Pretty annoying, but also pretty easy to fix in the Finder preferences.
I have my mother also set up on an all-Apple diet, consisting on an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and a (recently ordered anew) iMac—admittedly she actually groks the interface and concepts better than most, But I maintain yes, it is easier, at least given my circumstances. Primarily because I'm also a macOS user—in fact, I haven't spent more than 5 minutes in front a Windows machine for over 10 years—having macOS problems to deal with gives me a cognitive head-start in the diagnosis game before I even have to hit a search engine or Apple's KB. I also don't like spending time configuring my computer too much (i3? Arch Linux? what?), I want things to just work, and I find Apple's defaults are reasonably good, but obviously I have a decent working knowledge of the internals, and state management that allows things to function smoothly—so I could spend time configuring things if I wanted to.
This is not a new realisation for many, but to most non-technical people, including older people, computers are merely tools to accomplish tasks. There have been times where my immersion in the outside world has been far greater than my time to sit down and configure my virtual world—work is busy, it's summer so I'm outside flying a lot. I disproportionally find during these times I regress from being a "computer nerd" to just a regular user of my tool—a phone or a laptop. I want it to do its job with as minimal effort as possible.
To this extent, window management is irrelevant to anyone who considers their computer a tool. macOS and iOS are specifically designed to obfuscate the details of which applications are running in the UI, i.e. on Mac,
⌘+Wdoesn't actually close much anymore, if you want to hard quit, you need⌘+Q, and on iOS, you need to enter into the multitasking interface which I would guess many people don't even know exists.The underlying operating system tries its best to ensure that open, but inactive applications use as few resources as possible, and will suspend (see: app nap) tasks it considers unimportant. This is even more aggressive on iOS. But alas, software is written by humans, and we are only human. Memory leaks and bugs do exist. Usually, I don't have to restart macOS unless I need to, maybe once a week or month. iOS gets restarted even less often, and frankly my watch has probably been powered on since I unboxed it—aside from software upgrades. Restarts are good and resolve 9 out of 10 of state-related computer issues.
There's often no point trying to educate someone who just wants to use their tool for its intended purpose about the tool's inner functions. Your car mechanic might gloss over some details with you to help you understand a problem and its fix, but he's not going to evangelise to you about the inner details of a planetary gear set.
The best course of action is the one that requires the least input from you to fix the problem: educate them about priority issues—probably don't let them throw the car into reverse while you're going forward at 60mph—but do the oil change on their behalf. Fix what outstanding issues you see when you see them. Be the mechanic, don't be an evangelist.
I think a Chromebook is best for this audience, but that has a lot of rough edges too. I don't think there are any mainstream devices that would work well in a nursing home, for example.
It seems like Alexa, Google Assistant, and similar devices might eventually get there. Not that voice is so great, but it does force UI simplification.
It is no better or worse than the other realistic options for personal computers. Each OS has a learning curve and part of the learning curve is deciding on workflows to support ease of use.
I think that OSX is not the default "holy grail of UX" for anyone, but there are certainly times when it makes sense to use OSX. If your non-technical person has an iPhone or an iPad, then it is almost certainly the best choice as an OS for their computer. Otherwise, they're all at about the same place.