At the risk of admitting how dumb I am I'm 69 yrs old and just got my first smartphone ( I always had a flip-phone in the past).
It's an iphone and it's so f**king complicated to navigate and use it's driving me nuts. Spent hours figuring out how to send group texts and even answering an incoming call was a PITA at first. Also had to make the text bigger it was so tiny I couldn't read it this too took a while to figure out. And for a couple days it wasn't making any sound alerts at all. Something about "airplane mode" or something else I forgot. Have to get my daughter to help me with it. Really discouraging. Please someone tell me I'm not the only one who's this tech-challenged.
First, you’re not dumb, just human. I do design digital interfaces and the state of the Apple iOS design has been worrying me for a long time, it used to be the absolute pinnacle of user friendliness, but in its almost 20 years of history had to grow and add so many functions that complicated the purity of its original vision. Apple wants to avoid traditional menu as much as possible, good in theory, but when you start to have three different modal screens depending on which side of the top part of the screen you “swipe down”, it is clear something has gone awry.
It’s convoluted and full of hard to grasp gestures and semi-hidden cues.
I suggest you to keep it clean, install only the messaging apps your social circle is using and absolutely follow the apple tutorials.
Look for an app called “Tips”, is on every iPhone, and follow the short tutorials, more than once, actually do it every time you’re thinking about something slightly unusual to do with the smartphone, after a while you wont need it anymore, but please don’t get angry at the phone and yourself when something goes in unexpected ways, frustration will peak easily with zero benefits for you.
I know for a fact that we, as humans in general, can be really proficient with whatever technology we stumble on ‘till our twenties, after that it becomes an hill climb, steeper and steeper. Obviously if you’re a nerd, like me, and live with tech it will be different, the level of struggles to endure vary for each one of us, but generally, after a certain age it becomes harder and there is nothing wrong with that.
Try to keep it calm, I’ve seen people throw away their phone and it’s sad, a failure for the designers and for the persons who are left out of the marvels that being online whenever you want gives. Those are wonderful tools, approach them with patience and you will see.
Edit for a last tip: read the system’s pop up, it’s boring, but you can trust Apple on this, if they deemed important for an app to tell you something whit a bunch of text you want to know what is saying. Usually is to protect your privacy or to explain why something does not work, our first instinct is to reach for the “close” button, and many subsequent problems arise from that.
