Baby Boomers and UI/UX — a time to rethink…
When it comes to designing UX and UI, Baby Boomers have usually taken a back seat, with people assuming they aren’t tech savvy enough to bother with. That trend has been changing but it was really accelerated by the Pandemic. In this article we will look at the evidence of that change to see that perhaps Baby Boomers have a role to play in UX and UI design after all.
Baby Boomers are becoming more switched on and use tech more than most people realize and anyone designing or building new apps should reset their design expectations accordingly.
According to GWI.com device ownership is seeing an increase in adoption by Baby Boomers. The most interesting of those was the increase in smart tech around the home (up 36%), smart wristband (up 64%) and smart watch (up 57%) over the course of the pandemic. According to the same research by GWI, 95% of baby boomers own smartphones. So not only do most own a smartphone, but they are also starting to use wearable tech.
The trend is clear, baby boomers are responding to surveys and telling us they are using more online services than they were previously. The pandemic forced them online for things like grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, the trouble however, is that unless the website or app is specifically for them, they often get overlooked in the design process because people make the assumption that they won’t use technology to the same extent. That is a huge mistake. The research clearly points to the fact that baby boomers are more online than ever.
A great example of a company embracing this is Instacart. Instacart actually set up a call center to help customers navigate their system, essentially training them how to use the app. This might seem like a neat solution, but what it says is that perhaps the underlying app was never designed with Baby Boomers in mind. Instacart actually talked about this on their company blog. To me, this says more about Instacart’s understanding that seniors can actually adopt technology quickly and that it is less expensive to help seniors understand how to use the app than it would be to redesign the app. It was a smart business decision. Empowering customers to use the websites as designed rather than redesigning it all is a great strategy. That said, it isn’t always going to work in every scenario, but the more we work on upskilling baby boomers the better.
While Millennials recently became the largest generation in the US, baby boomers are still the wealthiest generation. According to the Federal Reserve they have the largest amount of personal wealth available for purchasing. Their purchasing power, at least in late 2022, was close to $70 trillion. This was more than all of the other generations combined, and yet when it comes to website design and baby boomers’ online presence, they are still underrepresented. With so much money available, it’s surprising that so many companies and websites overlook the baby boomer influence. In a post pandemic world, it’s clear that baby boomers have not only adapted to the changes, but are thriving. Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we design websites.
