User Experience – UX for the over 70’s
Development • October 20, 2022
Guest Blogger Alan Middleton explains what User Experience means to him.
First let me say I have never heard of the term ‘UX’ before. My first reaction is that it is straight from a Sci-Fi movie, with aliens chasing silver-backs, with ray guns asking them to hand over their pensions or be vaporized.
I now have heard ‘UX’ is a branch of real science not looking to harm me. But to enhance my way of life by using the INTERNET (which I have heard about). How it does it down the telephone line to our home remains a mystery for many including me. By using a ‘server’ and a ‘hub’ a console with flashing lights, which sits on a shelf in a ‘safe place’ in my living room. And on no account has to be touched or moved. I hold my breath when I go near it and feel I should genuflect to it’s all embracing glory. What this ‘hub’ does is magical and ‘communicates’ with my computer by waves zooming through the ether. It cleverly can even send my information to a ‘cloud’ somewhere in the world.
User Experience – Backups, Reboot & Viruses
Other terms to learn to love are ‘back ups’ and ‘reboot’ when the Internet goes down. It even has its own worldwide Super Villains who are formidable modern-day foes for my boyhood hero Superman. There are Web viruses who apparently ‘eat’ the computer programs, so they don’t work. There are international nasties called ‘hackers’, who want to harm me and demand a ransom to ‘kindly’ give me back my own information. I regularly get messages to ‘update’ my computer as they need to ‘patch’ the software program presumably where it has been eaten up by a virus.
User Experience – The Future
The World has changed for UX silver-backs or as some prefer to say the Post War baby boomers. It is a steep learning curve. To understand the new dictionary of terms at the touch of our fingertips on our computer. I have only just learned the difference between ‘software’ and ‘hardware’. And now have to understand what is a ‘blog’ and how ‘apps’ seem to have taken over the Universe.
We now must use a ‘mobile phone’ instead of a ‘landline’ and ‘text’ everyone from a miniature keyboard – which we can’t see. That reminds me I must see my optician once the Lock-down is over and the dentist to get a new set of false teeth.
Night God Bless.
