Mark Kent wrote:
> We could use Egyptian Hieroglyphs, except that few people understand
> them any more. Icons are no more inherently meaningful than any
> other abstraction, so have to be learnt.
Some people are just technophobic that way. My dear-old mother still has
difficulty with the remote on her combo VCR/DVD/HDD box. She'll call me
in the middle of the night to ask which button is "play". I assume that
the video navigation buttons use internationally recognised symbols that
everyone instinctively understands, but when you're 78 years old and
have alzheimer's, I guess it's not so easy.
Judging by what I've read in this thread, it seems to be a common
affliction ;)
> Looking them up in manuals is easy, just have a picture in a manual!
Oddly enough, many people find manuals equally intimidating.
I ended up writing a step-by-step diagram for using the combo-box. It
does help, but my mother still spends a few minutes each time searching
the remote ... like a novice scanning the control panel in a nuclear
power plant, and with just as much trepidation.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| 'When it comes to knowledge, "ownership" just doesn't make sense'
| ~ Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. http://tinyurl.com/22bgx8
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
14:00:14 up 90 days, 11:36, 4 users, load average: 0.44, 0.16, 0.06
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