Recently I had occasion to observe a medical expert, a senior professor at a major hospital, as he tried to access a patient’s medical information on the hospital’s computer network. This took a while, and he turned to me and said “As you can see, this computer is no friend of mine”. He then added, apologetically, “Now, if only my grandson were here, he could do this in no time”.

Obviously the doctor was of the pre-computer generation, and many would dismiss his difficulty as a natural result of his age. But as I thought it over, it occurred to me that the man before me is a top notch expert in a field of modern medicine, which is far more complicated than computer operation; his skill and wisdom were well above most people’s. And he was not trying to do any AI programming in machine language; he was in fact looking for data on a system designed to provide that very data. There was absolutely no reason why he should apologize; no, if the computer system did not lend itself to effortless achievement of its purpose by such an intelligent user, it is whoever devised the system who should apologize to him!

The perception – which many older users would agree with – that the computer is not a friend, is a warning sign to computer software designers. The population in the West is aging, and our computers should take that into account; whatever makes a grandfather less at ease than a grandson, the system should be designed to work around it. Quite possibly, in fact, we need a new User Interface paradigm altogether – one that people of all the age groups we have in the world would feel equally at ease with. If the standard Windows-based computer fails to give this feeling to a major population segment, then we need something other that Windows (and its equivalents on other platforms). I hope someone is thinking about it up at Redmond!