"What have they been thinking about for half an hour without a mobile phone after the vaccination?"
Some time ago, an old man sat for half an hour waiting for the video to end, which reminded Maizi of her grandmother.
In her mind, Grandma's life was a cycle of repetition:
"WatchING TV with your family, watching a room or two to sleep, waking up and walking around the room, or running to the balcony in a daze and basking in the sun, basically living like this every day." 」
Seeing the old man who also did not have a mobile phone, Mai Zi moved the idea of buying a smartphone for her grandmother.
In fact, smart phones and the elderly are the keywords of wheat's daily work. She is the administrator of the Douban group of "Teaching Parents to Play Mobile Phones" and a member of the "Mai Ling" Mini Program team.
More than 3,000 "Surfing Tutorials for the Elderly"
The story should start with the "teach parents to play mobile phones" Douban group.
The group was established on October 12, 2021, with the nickname set to "Little Manual" for its members, and now has more than 9,400 members.
Here, some people ask for help on how to choose mobile phones for the elders, teach the elders to play mobile phones, and various suggestions rush to the scene; some people take the initiative to share methods and experiences, such as the ripples on the surface of the water after the stone is thrown; there are also many posts that share touching, sad and complaining, from which they understand each other better and understand the elders better.
The details are different, and the common denominator is that everyone is trying to solve the problem.
These exchanges are necessary and useful, but small groups alone are not enough, and there are still people looking for more efficient and direct access to the elderly.
On November 2 last year, the administrator Mai Zi published an article in the group "In order to teach the elders to play mobile phones, we made a gadget", inviting interested team members to join the internal test. The gadget here is the mini program "Mai Ling".
The harmonic sound of "Wheat Age" is "Mai Ling", hoping that the elders can overcome the barriers of age and integrate into the era of intelligence; the flower language of wheat is "cooperation" and "praise", which is intended to allow young people and the elderly to cooperate with each other and work together to cross the digital divide.
The intuitive feeling of opening "Mai Ling" is that the font size and page layout are quite friendly to the elderly.
In the most important tutorial setting, "Mai Ling" chose a form between graphics and video - full voice guidance, each step can be clicked in the corresponding position, so that the elders have a sense of real operation.
At the beginning, there were 600 or 700 Douban team members who participated in the internal test, and more than 300 people participated in the co-creation of tutorials, and now there are more than 3,000 tutorials in the background of "Mai Ling", involving more than 100 software.
WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and other "national applications" are among them, and there are also jelly beans (square dance teaching) that are particularly liked by the elders, meishu (middle-aged and elderly graphic creation and sharing community), mother's opera and so on.
Each software has a collection of tutorials to facilitate systematic learning for the elderly. In general, it covers many fields such as convenient payment, social communication, leisure and entertainment, consumer shopping, knowledge learning, sports and health.
Those who want to do their own tutorials for their elders can also upload their own tutorials.
How about tutorials that are suitable for seniors? In an interview with AiFan'er, Mai Zi of the Mai Ling team shared her views:
First of all, the details of the steps are very important, for example, agree to the software use agreement and the next step, we will be divided into two steps, so that the elderly will not be confused when operating. Secondly, the audio explanation should be clear and clear, not too brief, it is best for the elderly to understand the meaning of this step, and how to operate. Again, the screenshot interface should be clean. Our tutorials are made of screenshots, if the screenshots are more coded and the background is chaotic, it is easy for the elderly to be dazzled.
In addition to tutorials, Malling also provides services such as common tools, daily news, Q&A section, and old photo restoration.
It is worth mentioning that on the "Common Tools" page, users can click the icon to jump directly to the corresponding Mini Program, such as "Health Code" and "Itinerary Code", an entrance to solve a variety of problems; daily news can be broadcast by voice throughout the process to adapt to the media habits of the elderly.
Malling is still iterating, the most recent update was to join the "Community" section. In this section, there are topics that the elderly are interested in every day, as well as answers to various questions to achieve peer or intergenerational exchanges.
Mai Zi told Ai Fan'er that the next version of Mai Ling will increase the dialect version of the tutorial, suitable for the elderly in different regions who do not speak Mandarin, and are also considering increasing the text-to-speech function, so that the illiterate elderly can also learn to use smart phones through Mai Ling.
Judging from Mai Ling's experience, the most important thing for the elderly to learn is the national software such as WeChat and Douyin. In addition, they also hope to learn some skills that are just needed, such as opening health codes, checking nucleic acid results, mobile phone payment, online grocery shopping, etc.:
The basic needs of the elderly are to use smart phones to solve problems in daily life, and cannot be abandoned by the world because they do not understand mobile phones, after all, mobile phones are needed almost everywhere to pass.
Of course, in order to make the Mini Program continue to shine, we must first introduce its use to the elders.
Connect the elderly with young people
The American scholar Schultz said in "The Economics of Old Age": "The elderly are not a group of similar members."
In the initial research phase, the Mai Ling team distributed nearly 300 questionnaires at several universities for the elderly in Wuhan to understand the use of smartphones by the elderly and the demand for the Internet.
At the same time, through one-on-one in-depth interviews, the Mai Ling team conducted 30-minute interviews with 20 elderly people in different cities, different levels of knowledge, and different ages to determine the smartphone use level of the elderly.
At present, Mai Ling mainly takes into account the different types of elderly people through the difficulty of the tutorial. In more than 3,000 tutorials, the elderly can learn according to their own needs.
It is worth mentioning that a volunteer in the Mai Ling team is usually very busy, helping the elderly deal with medical insurance, social security and other affairs at the grassroots level, but still taking time to make one or two tutorials in the evening.
Because of the daily contact with the elderly, the text description of the tutorial she made is very clear, the steps are also very detailed, and it is basically passed in one go.
In addition to such a universal tool as "Wheat Age", the "folk wisdom" of thousands of people cannot be ignored.
More common are step-by-step screenshots and notes, recording the operation process with a video recording, hand-drawn instruction manuals... In 2014, there were already hand-drawn cartoons explaining the usage and use of WeChat.
There are also users who share mobile phone screens in videos through functions such as Apple's FaceTime, Huawei's Changlian, or tencent meetings, Zoom and other applications, step by step to tell the elders where the functions they want and how to operate them.
▲ Huawei DLBLU's screen sharing function.
Just as it is necessary to teach the elders to open the "wheat age" first, whether it is easy or difficult to digitize, young people must assume the role of guides.
To use tools to connect people, the essence is still to use people to connect people.
Wheat also believes that tools are only an aid:
Whether it is a small program or an app, it is not the most important, what can really help the elderly to solve what they do not want to learn is the curiosity of the elderly themselves about the world; what can really solve the problem of not wanting to teach is the filial piety of children to their elders. And our small programs are more of an auxiliary role, providing learning tools for those who want to learn, and providing teaching shortcuts for young people who want to teach.
More problems still depend on the wisdom and patience of young people.
I don't think it's necessary not to want to learn, I'm afraid of being blind, I'm afraid of being scammed and deducting money, I don't have good eyesight, I can't read at all... These are the reasons why the elderly can't learn smartphones well.
But correspondingly, the members of the "Teach Parents to Play Mobile Phone" group also gave many solutions according to their own practice, and Ai Fan'er summed up a few experiences:
1. Older people, learn convenient and practical basic functions, can also be shared between the elderly machine and smart phones; 2. 3. Teach the elderly more interested in the functions, and there will be more interest in learning with peers; 3. 4. Deepen the sense of urgency of the elderly for a certain function in the environment, such as visiting the vegetable market and scanning the code to pay, traveling and Didi taxi; 5. Teaching in languages that are more interested in and remembered by the elderly; With enough patience and appropriate praise in the teaching process, the mastery of a function depends mainly on rote and practice;
It can be seen that tools can play a part of the role in it, making the whole process more pleasant and convenient, but good intergenerational relations are still fundamental, and it is better to teach people to fish than to teach people to fish.
There are always people who are young, and there are always people who are getting old
Behind the discomfort of smart phones for aging, it reflects the logic of young people's supremacy in digital society - when the elderly fade the role of laborers and retire from the family, they are often regarded as groups that need social support and do not produce value.
The elderly who are left behind by the digital society not only mean the loss of a more convenient life, but even the life itself. For example, it is more convenient to see a doctor and take a taxi, but it may make the elderly helpless and difficult to move.
It is a fact that the elderly who have access to smartphones and the Internet are still a minority.
CNNIC's 49th "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" shows that there are relatively many elderly netizens who can independently complete network activities such as showing health codes/itinerary cards, purchasing daily necessities, and finding information, but the proportion is only about half; even fewer can independently complete network activities such as calling cars, booking tickets, and registering.
The digital society should give the elderly more gentle transition periods.
If Mai Ling solves the problem of "will not use", then the ageing transformation that began at the end of 2020 is to make the Internet "better use", and the two complement each other.
The profession of professional companions is quietly emerging. As the name suggests, what they do is to accompany the elderly to the doctor, in addition to registering, taking tablets, taking medicine, more importantly, to help the elderly put down the anxiety of medical treatment.
Since the epidemic, the "health code" has become a travel necessity and a travel problem for many elderly people. Wuxi Railway Station once opened a "no health code channel" for passengers who could not show a health code; Henan, Shanghai, Anhui and other places launched a paper version of the "health code" that relatives can help apply for on their behalf.
The elderly have no ability to identify Internet information, and they regard self-media information as authoritative as they did with TV newspapers in the past. The public account "Guoxue Loves Life", founded by young people, uses magic to defeat magic, imitates the favorite style of the elderly, tells their parents that instant noodles are not poisonous, and advises them to eat how much to cook and how much not to eat leftovers.
There are always people who are young, but no one is always young. Interestingly, in the comment section of Weibo V@ Dizzz recommending "Mai Ling", there is a popular comment that is:
"I don't know what I need."
Similar to Mai Ling, "Silver Hair Qingsong Assistant" is also a small program that teaches parents to play mobile phones, launched by Tencent Technology Public Welfare and launched on the eve of chongyang Festival last year. The R&D team defined it like this:
In the long run, the Silver Pine Assistant is a "transitional" product. We will eventually grow old, and as natives of the digital age, we should not need it in the future. That is to say, the mission of the silver-haired green pine assistant can see the end, and we will run all the way across it.
When we pull the long-term dimension, adapt to aging, and even broader accessibility, it is not only about the current elderly, but also about the young people now and the elderly in the future.
Intergenerational and social support in every session is crucial, even if only for the simplest of phrases – "All will grow old".