Make Devices More User Friendly I fancy myself as a person who has been involved in technology ever since I was programming computers in college with punch cards. When I moved into home computers when they were not very capable, I tried to learn everything about them I could. I may be old today, but I have kept up pretty much, and yet there have been some exasperating things which have happened to me involving technology over the years and to other people I know. One of the problems with new technology is once something goes wrong the cause may not be obvious. Most people if they are not taking those devices which are not working properly to somewhere to have the problem solved, go online and try and find the cause of the problem. I think a very high percentage of us have done this. That in itself can be aggravating. One of the things which always annoys me when I am looking for a solution to a problem is going online and following several steps only to find the next step is pointing me to a place which does not exist in the settings or app. This has happened many times. Why does this happen? It happens because sometimes the instructions we are looking at are for an older or newer version of the app or our settings. This is not fun after you have wasted a lot of time getting to the step before this problem. Recently I had a problem with a Ring video door bell and the Echo device it worked with for over a year. It seemed like a simple problem to solve. There are what is known as skills which enable devices pared with the echo and the doorbell is one of these devices. I somehow lost the skill which allows me to use the bell. The bell could no longer be found in the list of devices pared to the Echo device. I enabled that skill, but it didn’t help. I tried to pair it to the Echo but couldn’t because it was not on the list of pared devices. I went to the Ring network and noticed it was discontinued. When I tried to activate it, I was getting a message stating it had no connection to the internet. I tried many other things which didn’t work including YouTube videos. After wasting two full half days, I gave up and packed the Ring bell away. I remember in the old days when something would go wrong with the operating system on the computer which just could not be found. In the very old versions of Windows, they might work fine for a while then suddenly break down and, in the end, you were forced to reinstall Windows. One of the problems with all this new technology is the interfaces are not simple enough for most people. There should be a simple way of getting back only which considers most errors and works them out for us by listing a problem with a button next to it, which when pressed, goes through all the motions to solve that problem. Yes, it would take a lot of programming and there might even be cases where something could not be fixed that way, but then detailed instructions should be in the programming to show us how to solve the problem. I spent a lot of time helping neighbors and friends with computer problems and during that time I could see that much of the stuff on the computer was just too complicated for the average person. Take setting up an email program. Today it is a lot easier than it used to be, but years ago you had to have some information of the account such as the port data and other things to do it. Today much of this is automatic after you enter the name for the email. I see so many complaints people are making about problems they can’t solve which have to do with gadgets, including computers and phones. Some of these problems have to do with devices getting synchronized together, not being able to get online, devices going off when they shouldn’t, and many other problems including the short period of times batteries last in a wireless device. These problems can annoy people so much they decide enough is enough and realize they don’t need that fancy thermostat or to turn on the lights with a command that only works periodically. I had a system where my lights in the living room were controlled by an app on my cell phone. This was operated by software using 3G. When I had to move to 5G cell service I had to buy a new 5G phone because my old phone didn’t support 5G and could not be updated. When I moved the app for the lights to the new phone it didn’t work with 5G. Talk about annoying. That was bad enough, but my 2018 car lost the functionality of some of the built in abilities it had. They only worked on 3G and the car could not be updated to receive a 5G signal. Remember the switch to 5G was known to be coming for years and the manufacturer of the car should have been prepared for it. I lost navigation, updates and several other things. Shame on them. There was one good thing however, when I started to use Google Maps for navigation, not only was it better than the built in navigation ever was, I could send it, using Android Play, to the screen in the car. There was no solution for the other things I lost however. It just doesn’t seem to me, enough thought is being put into the apps that control our devices, and this is true for other things also. It seems companies just want to get it out and make money even if the app could be made much better. Look at the Artemis Rocket NASA is going to send to the moon. It uses old technology and an article came out stating it was using some old space shuttle parts. The devices we use should have built in problem solving and be bullet proof. The screen of death on Windows updates should be a thing of the past. The average person should not have to be an engineer to solve device problems. Also, some of the devices which seem to have an inordinate problem with connecting wirelessly, should also have an option for a wired connection, such as printers which seem to have a lot of trouble with their wireless connections. Not all printers have this anymore. Make things more user friendly.
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