What COVID Exposed
When COVID hit, everyone was home and the phone suddenly had to do everything. News, video calls, ordering food, finding information. Things that used to happen in person or through someone else. For most younger people that shift was fine. For a lot of older adults it wasn't.
Figuring out how to navigate, what an icon meant, how to go back. I'd never thought about any of that. You don't realize how much you're relying on years of familiarity until you watch someone try to learn the whole thing from scratch.
That's what started this. We were watching our own family members struggle with something we'd grown up taking for granted.
What I Thought Going In
Going in, I figured the issues would mostly be visual. Text too small, contrast too low, icons too abstract. Standard accessibility stuff. That was my first guess, and honestly it felt like the kind of problem that would be easy to fix once we found it.
That turned out to be a pretty narrow way of looking at it. I kept thinking — if something's clear to me, why wouldn't it be clear to someone else who's paying attention? The interviews kind of undid that pretty fast. There's so much I do on my phone that I genuinely can't explain how I know to do it. Years of accumulated familiarity. My uncle doesn't have any of that. He was figuring it out basically from nothing.
The Research
We interviewed 19 people aged 43–92 — mostly family members across India, UAE, and Qatar — through in-person conversations and video calls. We had a question guide, but a lot of the most useful stuff came from conversations that went off somewhere we didn't plan. Someone would mention something casually and that would open up something much bigger. You can't really get that from a survey.
To get a broader picture, we sent a Google Form survey through WhatsApp groups across the same regions. 81 responses came back. That gave us something to check the interviews against — to see what was specific to one person and what kept showing up everywhere.
Interviews
Responses
What We Found
The Phone Meant Something Different to Each Person
For one participant (age 92), a smartphone was basically WhatsApp. That was all he used it for, and that was enough. For another (age 43), it was how she unwound after managing the household all day. The same device, used for completely different reasons, carrying different weight for each person.
Most used apps across all 19 participants: WhatsApp (17/19), YouTube (12/19), Facebook (10/19). Everything else was secondary.
Average Daily Usage: ~82 minutes
Older participants spent less time on the phone and used it for a narrower range of tasks. The 60+ group averaged around 36 minutes a day, and most of that time was spent on one or two apps.
They Held the Phone With Two Hands
Most younger people use a smartphone one-handed. The interaction model is built around that. The participants in this study held the phone with one hand and tapped with the other, which made a lot of standard tap targets hard to reach. That assumption about how phones get held is built into almost every app, and nobody in the design process had thought to question it.
Interface Problems Nobody Was Designing For
The same problems kept showing up across different people, different ages, different locations.
What they already know
Go, submit, confirm, safe — learned from traffic lights, ATMs, and early Nokia phones.
Stop, cancel, danger — universally reinforced across every interface they'd ever used.
Where modern UI breaks it
Used as brand-primary, not action-signal. Ambiguous to anyone who never built this association.
"Secondary action" in design systems, but participants read it as disabled, broken, or unavailable.
The Psychological Side
We asked how people felt while using their phones. The range of responses was wider than we expected, and often contradictory within the same person.
- Happy — talking to family from anywhere, seeing photos of grandchildren.
- Connected — staying in touch through WhatsApp groups and Facebook.
- Independent — being able to look something up without asking someone for help.
- Frustrated — when an interface blocked them from doing something simple.
- Helpless — when they forgot a password and had no way back in.
What the Research Suggested
After going through all the interviews and the survey data, the same things kept showing up across different people, different ages, different locations.
Label Your Icons
Just put text next to the icon. Sharda would stare at the attachment button in WhatsApp and have no idea what it did. The moment there's a word next to it, that stops being a problem. For a lot of participants it was literally the difference between completing what they were trying to do and just closing the app.
One Primary Action Per Screen
Facebook's feed came up in almost every interview. Stories, ads, birthday reminders, suggested posts — all at once. Someone who just wants to see family photos has to sort through all of that first. That extra load adds up fast, and for someone who's already not fully comfortable with the interface, it's enough to make them stop and put the phone down.
Make Feedback Visible and Persistent
One participant sent a message with no internet and had no idea it didn't go through. The clock symbol meant nothing to her. A confirmation that disappears after two seconds doesn't really help anyone. It needs to stay on screen, be readable, and be obvious — otherwise it's basically not there.
Design for Two-Handed Use
Most apps assume you're holding the phone in one hand and tapping with your thumb. Everyone in this study held it with both hands. Important actions at the far edges of the screen were hard to reach, and that's not a user error — that's a design assumption that was never checked.
Build Language Switching Into Onboarding
A lot of participants couldn't navigate the interface because it was in English and they weren't comfortable reading English. That language setting exists — it's just buried. If someone's primary language isn't English, the phone should ask that on day one, not require them to find it in settings.
Use Color Consistently
People who couldn't read labels navigated entirely by color. Red meant stop or go back. Green meant it worked. That held up really well — until an app did something different with those colors, and then they were completely stuck. It's a solvable problem if anyone's thinking about it.
What I Took From This
When I started this I genuinely thought I had a pretty good sense of how people used phones. Like, phones are phones. The research kind of just showed me how much of what I know is stuff I picked up over years without ever realizing it was something I was learning.
My grandmother navigating to WhatsApp, my uncle trying to figure out how to go back without closing the whole thing — they were learning from scratch. Usually with a family member sitting next to them trying to explain it, usually by making mistakes and hoping nothing broke. And the whole time, the people who designed those apps had just assumed all of that would be obvious.
What stuck with me from this project is how many assumptions get baked in before a single real user ever touches the thing.
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