5 things to remember when designing digital for older audiences
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been asked to build more and more digital experiences for older users of the internet. Through these experiences we’ve learned a few things that you should consider when designing for people who have not grown up using digital tools.
It should be noted that ALL of these practices are simply good UX and design no matter who are your primary audience!
User Insights
Part of our work has included a survey of over 6,000 active internet users who are 55 years or older. From this we found a few great insights:
- Everybody is using digital tools to communicate with their families. These include email, Whatsapp and Facebook
- There is a deep distrust of using digital tools for anything to do with financial payments
- Trust can be generated by using similar patterns from well established sites such as the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and Money Saving Expert
1. Tablets tablets tablets (soon voice)
Mice and keyboards abstract a user’s experience from what is happening on the screen. They put a barrier between what they are doing and the elements they are controlling.
Touch interfaces makes this process much easier to handle. You simply use your own tool, your finger, and point at what you want to interact with. As such, tablets have seen huge growth for older audiences — many being bought for them by their children at Christmas.
If you’re designing for a consumer audience over 65 years old, chances are you should be thinking tablet first.
This group are also going to be some of the quickest to adopt voice commands as they find them so much easier than any digital interaction…
2. Show one thing at a time
If you have grown up using digital tools, then you are likely to have developed all sorts of affordances through you experiences. One of these is the ability to focus on the most important information on the page — blocking out the rest of the noise contained within it. One such result of this is so called ‘banner blindness’ where users sub-consciously ignore display banners on a web page.
For those that haven’t been through these formative experiences, they are likely to be much more confused by complex displays of information on the page. As such, you have to show a single piece of information, or single question wherever possible.
This approach will force you and your team to prioritise information ruthlessly. If it’s not adding a significant value, then it needs to be left off. You can’t risk it becoming a distraction from what your user is trying to achieve.
3. Avoid flat designs
Flat design is a trend that was started by Microsoft with its Windows 8 operating system. It reduces the use of drop shadows, gradients or textures to achieve a clean, minimalist look and feel. It is without doubt a huge step forward in creating a design system that’s digital first, rather than borrowed from the real world or print.
However, if you have less digital affordances, then this delineation from the real world is a problem. Depth and the world of 3 dimensions is what you’re used to. Anything that doesn’t follow that system makes life much harder.
In particular when it comes to buttons — you want to make sure that it looks like something you’d press with a bit of depth. This can still be done in a way that remains clean and modern — but is essential for ensuring they’re recognised as an interactive element.
4. Use strong colour contrasts and significant font differences
Checking for contrast between colours is a key tenant of website accessibility standards. In short, you need to make sure the ratios for colour contrast on text are as high as possible.
The measures are well documented by the W3 group as part of their AAA and AA standards. You can also access a range of digital tools to let you check your work such as the WebAIM contrast checker.
For an older audience this is obviously even more key than for younger groups. As we age our eye sight becomes less able to pick out the differences in colour tones and hues. So something which might seem perfectly readable to a 20 year old, could be nearly invisible for somebody only a few years older.
It is critical that you ensure your font colour choices meet the highest standards of colour contrast. What could be more of an issue is the effect that choices and designs would have for a colour blind audience. About 1 in 12 men suffer from some form of this condition so it’s worth thinking about — https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/colour-vision-deficiency/
See how your website looks when different versions of colour blindness are simulated — https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/
It is also important, to create significant distance between the sizing of different headings and body copy. Having 2pt difference between your H3 and H2 is not going to give the information the hierarchy that it needs to lead users down the page and highlight the most crucial information.
Finally, make sure you keep line widths to a minimum, to reduce strain on peoples’ eyes.
5. Don’t use acronyms or technical speak
In a piece of user testing we ran, a participant actually said that the medical service he was using, made him feel like an idiot — because of all the language they used which he didn’t understand. He felt like they were in an ivory castle talking down to him and that he wasn’t ‘worthy’ to be given the care that he was looking to access.
You must use plain english that simplifies what you’re trying to say, without dumbing it down. This comes down to good writing that is clearly prioritised for its audience (as above) and then edited by someone other than the original writer.
