Saturday, September 20, 2008

No touch phone (for old people)

I realize that older people don't necessarily want new technology. But I also know that some of that is based on a reluctance to learn how to use it. I've written about this before. There may be new developments that could really benefit someone but they'll never even come close to a) learning how to use them and b) even wanting to. That's kind of bad. So, the idea is for a phone that strips away the learning curve. It's not steep or gradual, it just isn't there.

The phone has no buttons. Just a big touch screen and the rest is audio driven. Want to turn it on? Say on. Want to turn it off? Say off twice (to avoid having it turn off in the middle of calls). So yeah, there is a learning curve because they need to learn voice commands. But the idea is to make it so intuitive that you're not bogged down by having to learn what a bunch of buttons do in different situations. You just say the logical thing based on what you want to have happen. I don't know what demographic would embrace this, if any, but it needs to be built with older people in mind. The hard stuff needs to be stripped away and the most obvious option needs to yield results.

No comments: