My aunt is an older woman living in a small city in my home country, Venezuela. Like thousands of people in the country, she is in quarantine due to COVID-19. 

When I called her two weeks ago, she was depressed and in a lot of pain. She couldn’t leave home because of the lockdown restrictions imposed by the government, and her only close family member was also isolated. She could only watch a TV channel (the National channel) but she couldn’t listen to music because her radio device got broken long ago. 

She has a smartphone with Internet access, through the cellular network, but she only used the phone call and WhatsApp call functionalities to communicate with me and other family members.

When I talked to her, I noted how stressed she was, so I decided to upskill her in the use of her phone. We live in different countries, and communicating with her was a little bit challenging because of her poor Internet connectivity. 

When we started the new technology learning journey, I noted that the elements of the smartphone user interface perfectly designed for improving the user experience didn’t make sense for her. For example, the icon representing a microphone didn’t mean anything because she couldn’t either recognize it or see it properly. On top of that, touching and scrolling the screen was something unimaginable for her. However, after some lessons, she learned how to navigate through Whatsapp and read my messages. She also started to become familiar with some buttons and understand the UI vocabulary, such as what is an icon.

I sent her some links to the local radio stations and a video of my daughter’s dance performance. She loved it and started to feel better. But we found a technical issue, she couldn’t listen to anything. The phone volume was muted or too low.

I found a video about how to unmute the phone but she didn’t know how to scroll the screen down. I tried to explain it to her unsuccessfully. As I mentioned, scrolling was an unimaginable action for her. I was so frustrated that I asked her to contact her family member for help. I didn’t hear from her in several days. Then she called me to say that she finally learned how to put the volume up by watching the video. It took her 5 hours of learning and practicing. At that point, she wasn’t depressed because she was so busy learning.

My last challenge was to make her send a WhatsApp message. She had been trying it for months unsuccessfully. I knew that she was more familiar with her phone and the user interface vocabulary and elements and she learned by following instructions on videos. So I decided to add somebody to my learning project. I called my daughter who my aunty loves very much and has a similar smartphone. I asked her to prepare a short video showing how to send a WhatsApp message. She needed to be welcoming and kind in the video and referred to any icon or button my aunt needed to press, using simple and traditional vocabulary, such as this is the image representing a phone enclosed in a bubble.

My daughter produced the video, which  I forwarded to my aunty immediately. Two hours later, my aunt wrote her first WhatsApp message. 

I have been an instructional designer and lecturer for several years but this is my perfect instructional design for teaching my aunty how to send a WhatsApp message. 

Be kind and patient with older people when teaching them how to use technology.