[uberduber]

Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge.

A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.

[war1025]

At the farmers market earlier this fall, the seller was having a hell of a time getting his phone to work so that he could swipe our card on his Square.

After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand.

Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything.

Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card.

Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation.

Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.

[usrusr]

> he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen

Yeah, the perfect amount of bezel is significantly more than zero, I really don't get the hype for maximising screen/body ratios. It's just impractical, at least without serious measures against wrapped touch like having a fully touch enabled side only tho know which touches near the edges of the screen to ignore.

[everdrive]

Although I'm sure this gets said fairly often around HN, smart phone "advancements" have stopped being "advancements" a while ago. They're they're closer to fads, and the cheaper brands have to chase the luxury brands, because the luxury brands get to define what is trendy. Much the same way that the rich get to set fashion trends, and the rest have to follow.

I'm not denigrating the upper class, fashion, or trends in general -- just pointing out that fashionable trends are different from technological advancement.

[uberduber]

On the zero bezel phones the software makes a huge difference. I have very small hands where I can barely grip friends' XL phones. If they have some cheap off-brand, discount prepaid or even fancy Chinese Android I am constantly activating it despite barely touching the edges, whereas I never have the problem on the Google Pixel or an iPhone.

[jmercouris]

Any tool requires learning and understanding- a time and effort investment. Using a cash register also requires training.

The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools.

I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use.

Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.

[wpietri]

Sure, you think that now, because you're in the group that interfaces are designed for. But once you're the guy at the farmer's market, you'll think differently. Power only matters if one can get something done with it. A kilogram of plutonium is enormously powerful, but that's no reason to carry it around in your pocket.

I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that.

And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface.

A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.

[Hyolobrika]

People should know that that power exists though. It should be available even if it's not always needed.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Any tool requires learning and understanding

No, it's just bad design. Holding a phone only from the sides is simply not comfortable nor very safe for the phone.

[acqq]

> Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.

I have my own story from today: I have iOS devices since forever and sill I had to google how to access some option. The damn things move between versions and some become invisible until you read somewhere where they are etc. It’s really that bad.

Previously on HN: “perfectly cropped”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920