Is this really making a browser easier to use?

I've discovered two computer environments targeted for seniors that can be installed on an existing computer: Eldy, which I mentioned in a previous post, and PointerWare, which I'll use as an example here. Both try to make a computer easy to use by greatly simplifying the interface, limiting functionality, and providing large buttons. There's nothing about them that's specific to seniors that I can see; they're really designed for novices of any age.

Here's the PointerWare opening screen:

The problem that this opening screen solves, I guess, is that a novice has trouble finding the four apps he or she wants to use, as well as the off button. Every computer system that such a person might use, whether MacOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, or Android, has an opening screen with big buttons (icons) on it, so this is a problem that doesn't exist. I assume the real reason for the screen is that PointerWare has to start somewhere, so its designers figured they ought to have an opening screen with large buttons.

But, every novice computer user I've met spends 90% or more of his or her time in a browser. I know a few for which it's 100%. Some of them don't know what a browser is; they think it's the computer. Clearly the PointerWare opening screen should be the browser.

Speaking of the browser, here it is opened to Yahoo:

The part of the Yahoo page that's visible has about 80 things to click on, some of which are very small. That's the web, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Yes, there are web pages that are simpler, but any user, senior or otherwise, wants to go to wherever his or her interests lead, not to a severely limited set of pages. Indeed, for the seniors I've talked to, access to the web is one of the two reasons why they want to use a computer at all. The other is email, but, if one learns how to use a web page, one can do email that way, too. So this leaves only one purpose for a computer: to access the web.

Given that a user has to learn how to navigate a web page, what's the benefit of having those giant buttons in the frame (HOME, Go Back, Save Site, etc.)? In fact, if they were smaller, the actual web page could be bigger, which would be helpful.

Here's the Yahoo page in Google Chrome, the browser I use:

Really, is Chrome any harder to use? The back, forward, and refresh buttons are small, but no smaller than what one finds on the Yahoo page itself. Instead of Up and Down buttons, there's the normal MacOS scrollbar, but, in my experience, users use the mouse wheel for scrolling anyway.

So, my thinking is that the PointerWare browser is solving a problem that doesn't exist.

PointerWare also suffers from the same problem as Eldy: If you type in a bad URL, you get a Windows alert that users associate with something being wrong:

When the user clicks the OK button, the alert goes away, leaving the blank window. The user has to figure out that the way to "check the name and try again" is to click the Go Back button. As I showed in my previous post, Chrome's error message for an invalid URL is much better.

My conclusion is that for what novice users do between 90% and 100% of the time--browsing the web--Eldy and PointerWare actually are worse than a regular browser.

Maybe their value is in what the other three buttons on the home screen do: Photos, Games, and Mail?  I doubt it. There are plenty of very easy-to-use games that run in a browser, most of which are much better than what's built into PointerWare. The Photos app seems to be limited to collecting photos attached to emails that were read with their email app, with no way to load photos from a camera or phone. The Mail app is for PointerWare email addresses only, but, given that the user has to deal with a huge variety of web pages anyway, there's no reason why Google or Yahoo mail can't be used, and they have the advantage of being accessible from outside of PointerWare.

There is an app for writing little memos, but there are web apps that run in a browser for that, too.

It seems to me that Eldy and PointerWare do not provide any usability advantages over a conventional computer that's appropriately set up, and in some ways make usability much worse.

What they do is provide a collection of commonly-used features already arranged in an easy-to-navigate environment. This could be done with web apps, but a novice obviously can't do it, and it's too much to ask a friend or family member to do it, assuming he or she even knows how and is capable of doing it well.

What I think works is a totally locked-down environment (no way for the underlying OS to show itself) running a browser most of the time, with a collection of easy-to-use apps already installed or readily installable.

There are three systems I know of that meet that description: iOS or Android running on a tablet, or a Chromebook running Chrome OS. (I haven't looked into Windows 8 yet.) I'll talk about those possibilities in a future post.