Rebooting the tech user experience for the elderly | Christine Rohacz | TEDxBoulder

WOW, Thank you... I am turning 70. I am ALONE. I am busy striving to learn and stay current with technology. I am searching for ways to make more money. I live alone. I am working to stay healthy and fit, and to keep my mind strong. Thank you for thinking of us.

I'm so happy I made productive decisions about my finances that changed my life forever,hoping to retire next year.. Investment should always be on any creative man's heart for success in life

Lovely to see the younger generation reaching out in very much needed areas of life. Well done that young lady!

This young female engineer has a golden heart.. Thank you!! ❤❤

Bravo! This Babbie is so happy to hear this great news from young people! Thank you, thank you thank you

Worth watching

I’m a new graduate nurse and this was so so so heartwarming to hear. I am so glad that this population has people like you to support and help them get the recognition they need.

I own and operate a photography business that primarily works with older people. It's such an amazing genre of photography and it boggles my mind why most photographers go after the young families, but not many of us seek to work with the people with "gray hair and wrinkles and a lifetime of wisdom to share". I'm just now starting to teach other photographers how to find and work with these salt of the earth beautiful people and their families. Thank you for recognizing them. I'm 59 now, my husband is 64. We're starting to feel it ourselves. None of us get out of this thing called life alive.

It's not just the elderly who have problems with today's tech user experience. I'm someone who as a teen was installing DOS and Windows operating systems and upgrading computer hardware back in the 90s and who owned a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) Windows "Pocket PC" handheld from the 2000s prior to the iPhone and smart phone era to give you my tech background. I'll be blunt - the move to touch screen interfaces, which can be useful and do have their place, has diminished or ruined the user experience on everything from phones to consumer electronics and appliances. Why does my name brand car stereo use a touch screen with tiny buttons that requires me to take my eyes off the road to adjust the volume and that have to be pressed repeatedly while stereos of previous years used a physical dial that I could feel around for while keeping my eyes on the road and adjust instantly? Why does my washing machine have a touch screen that requires me to hold down the start button for 2 seconds instead of a physical button to simply press once to engage the washer? Why does my phone completely eliminate an interface and make me do arbitrary gestures to accomplish anything? It might as well require me to click my heals 3 times and say "there's no place like home" (another completely arbitrary task) to move from one screen to another. I encourage everyone to read the 2015 article "How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name" by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. Apple started this horrible trend but others ran with it. My car stereo is a Pioneer, my washer is a Whirlpool, and my phone is a Motorola Android. Microsoft Windows 8, while its performance was excellent, had the worst desktop computing interface I've ever used. When MS-DOS and Linux are are easier to use than Windows, you know you've screwed up and fortunately they did a course correction with Windows 10. But there needs to be a lot more course corrections out there over a wide variety of devices. Touch screen should be one of the alternative ways to interface with tech, not designed as the only way.

Thank you so much for bringing attention to this. I have been helping an elderly neighbor with her type 2 diabetes, and have realized the tech and tools were NOT made with accessibility in mind.

I'm only 34, always a skeptic and an old soul for the record, but this talk really hit me. Great perspective on nuances and general state of these social spheres. Well said miss

Thank you

Thanks for sharing this video

Thank you so much for this inspirational and incredibly important talk, Christine! This is indeed the responsibility of each and everyone of us, especially those who make the products and services that people rely on everyday.

I have just turned 65 and have been struggling to catch up with ALL this technology. It hasn't been easy at all. It seems that in my country, in your country, doesn't matter where, It hás been the same. Thank you for listening tô us. It is a good start.

Sharon I'm one of those older people now, but I partly blame it on my late parents who never saw fit to buy their only child a computer (money was not the issue). I used the computer in the public library for over 20 years, until I finally bought a little netbook, now obsolete. With a computer my father and I could have learned together, and it would have helped made his activist stuff much easier.

Powerful and true. Thank you for this.

I’ve been saying this for years. My generation is becoming more and more invisible. Thank you for bringing this to the forefront. By the time these changes are made, it’ll be too late for us seniors.

A really thought provoking presentation, thank you for sharing

God bless YOU!!!