Ideally, if everything goes to plan, Big Buttons will not only allow somebody who is totally new to computers to perform basic functions, but will guide the user through the computing experience and allow them to perform increasingly complex tasks, until voila – no more need for Big Buttons at all!

I will let you know how things go, but at the moment the development programme appears to be 6 months long, so there won’t be much if anything to show until August – September 2010.

http://www.seniorsguidetocomputers.com/

… is extremely useful! Have a look!

Albert & Logan News 28.10.09

If you know of a news paper that would be interested in writing about Big Buttons to help get more seniors online, please let us know!

The phenomenon in the Western World of the “Ageing Population” means that there are more and more retirees requiring pensions and fewer and fewer labourers producing the revenue that will pay for the retirees. The obvious cure (or at least mitigation against) is to allow seniors to produce wealth for longer.

If seniors learn how to use computers, which in most cases is as simple as overcoming fear of the unknown, they become far more appetising to employers. Operating a computer does involve many months of practice, to reach a level where one might consider oneself “competent” or at least “confident”, but the individual tasks involved with computing are quite simple. With time, computing can be mastered by just about anyone.

Consider this: if you were an employer, would you hire a young, untested candidate with proficiency in computing, or would you hire a 65 year old veteran of your industry who is also competent in computing?

In many situations, the latter option is far more appealing (reduced necessity for training, value for money etc) and the main thing that’s stopping this recruitment scenario from being the norm is a lack of understanding of computing by seniors!

If we solve this problem, there are too many benefits to count.

Here are a few:

1. Our economy will reach a new level of efficiency, as wisdom of seniors is injected back into industries
2. Seniors themselves will enjoy the many benefits that remaining in work can bring (with the option of retirement still available, of course)
3. Young people will be forced to learn real skills, as opposed to mere computer proficiency in order to compete for jobs – boosting the overall skill base of the economy
4. Seniors will enjoy the many benefits that IT literacy can bring to their lives

Telephone design for seniors

An Australian website also provides a senior-friendly phone: http://seniorphone.com.au/

A mobile phone designed for seniors.

It is similar to Big Buttons in the way it makes useful computing tasks simple and intuitive to access:

Eldy is a great piece of free software for seniors!

I think that this software is fantastic for those seniors and other computer users who do not wish to learn about more advanced computing tasks.

Big Buttons is not as self-contained as Eldy and is more of a pair of training wheels in the sense that a user of Big Buttons will still have to ride the bike in order to move forward (i.e. know how to save a document in a word processor and use the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons in the Internet browser). Eldy is more like a motorised wheelchair, to follow this analogy.

I recommend that you try Eldy and Big Buttons and see which is more useful for you!

Download Eldy by clicking here and following the links.

Download Big Buttons by clicking here.

It’s time to wake up!

Big Buttons

With Big Buttons you can take the stress out of teaching the elders of your family clan how to use a computer/ the Internet… and give them the jump-start they need. They will thank you for it, and thank you many times over with e-mails to you!

Imagine waking up and seeing an e-mail from your grandfather, telling you how proud he is of you… EVERY DAY.

Imagine checking your e-mail late at night and finding a forwarded e-mail from your grandmother of some flowers and some cute animals jumping around. Why did she send this to you? Because she can thanks to you!

Find out more and get this big ball rolling without delay by clicking here.

CD, case and instruction booklet

Last year when I was teaching seniors how to use computers around Logan City, an 80 year old lady told me that she had just bought a laptop. She was very proud that it would do the jobs that her vintage Windows 95 machine could not. I listened, and she kept explaining the lovely experience of buying the computer itself.

It went something like this:

The kind young man told me that he was very impressed I was getting in to computers when it was usually something young people did. I told him that I’m well used to taking risks and learning new things and he said I was a very unusual customer. I asked him what type of computer would best suit my needs… just e-mailing and maybe the odd game of solitaire, maybe sorting through some photos from family picnics etc… and he directed me to one of the newest laptops on offer. It was well over $2,000, but he said it wouldn’t let me down. I could do anything at all on it, he said. So I bought it! But then I didn’t know what to do with it… I couldn’t even turn it on. So for a ’seniors discount’ fee of $90, the sales people set the computer up for me. It was interesting to watch and was surprisingly quick… it looked as though the young man who set it up for me simply pressed one or two buttons and talked to his friends in the back room which I could see through a glass panel. Well I suppose the $90 was put to good use since I didn’t know how to turn it on!

This poor lady was ripped off in at least two ways:

1. She could have picked up a computer to suit her needs for around $500
2. The $90 “set-up fee”  is highway robbery and appears to be a blatant play on the ignorance of senior citizens regarding IT generally

Another lady (ignore the theme of ‘ladies’ that appears to be emerging… I assure you the situation is almost identical for senior gents) told me of the following situation:

I couldn’t work out how to send an e-mail or turn the bloody thing off! So I asked my friends and they had no idea either… Windows Vista or some bloody thing was beyond them, they told me. So I looked in the yellow pages and found a company called ‘Nerds on Wheels’ or something, and they came to my house the same day. I had written a list of about 10 questions to ask and now that I look back on it, they were very much ‘introduction to computers’ style questions like “how do I turn this thing off?” and “do I left or right click?”… the guy was there for about 30 minutes and I was whacked with a bill for $100! I know he was just doing his job, but where’s the compassion? I’m a pensioner and I can barely afford my medicine let alone a consultant. I just wish there was a cheaper service available.

Well clearly there are cheaper services available, but they don’t receive anywhere near the funding necessary to reach people such as those above. Many pensioners aren’t actively engaged in social groups, so even hearing about these services is unusual in many cases.

Without an international response to this information-technology-ignorance amongst senior citizens, they are ripe for the picking by unscrupulous profit-seeking enterprise (not that there’s anything wrong with profit-seeking… it’s the lack of scruples I take issue with).

1. Be ashamed

2. Be very ashamed

Of course there are exceptions, but by and large our grandparents have done a very good job seeing to the survival of their children and grandchildren over the past decades. Without them, there wouldn’t be any young’uns at all… and of course, there would be no computers or Internet either!

The benefits of showing nan & pops how to use a computer are immense:

1. You can share photos with them
2. Communicating to others on the Internet can be a great cure for boredom
3. They can save money by not buying the newspaper every single day
4. They don’t have to wait in line in a bank and risk catching swine flu or being caught in a terrorist attack

… and the list goes on.

Think back to how your grandfather showed you how to shoot a gun or your grandmother showed you how to bake a cake. Repay that debt! Sharing is caring!

Get granny online!