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“Older people can’t use technology”: Refuting assumptions through research 

In the 2000s, as the organization known now as AARP saw the “silver Tsunami” of Baby Boomers entering old age coming, I was fortunate to get to do some research along with Ginny Redish about the experience of older adults as they interact with the world. 

AARP wasn’t the only organization looking at this, though it makes sense that they would. AARP is a nonprofit that offers services to people over age 50 and lobbies Congress on issues related to Social Security, Medicare, and other policies that affect older people and their families. 

Fidelity, a wealth management company with a robust human-centered design practice, realized that many of the daily users of their website were in their 80s. It made sense to understand the experience older people had as they interacted with the information and available transactions online. 

(This was relatively early days for the internet. There were not a lot of transactions you could perform online. While stock trading came online fairly early in the 2000s, exchanging mutual funds – the backbone of most retirement accounts – was not available until 2003 or so.) 

Your perception of what older people are capable is probably wrong

Going into the research, what we heard from mostly people younger than age 50 was that older people couldn’t cope with technology. That they would struggle with websites in ways that younger people would not. 

What we all realized pretty quickly was that there was a huge range of ability, attitudes, and aptitudes in this massive demographic.  But if a website was not usable, it wasn’t because the user was 63 or 89. It was because the website wasn’t usable by lots of people, independent of age. 

We took apart what people meant when they assumed that older adults couldn’t deal with technology and what we found was a medicalized mental model. The assumption was that as the warranty runs out on what were assumed to be perfectly functioning body parts. Then, when you start to experience accelerated aging, you become disabled. You might have poorer eyesight or hearing. Dexterity and mobility degrade. In addition, the mental model of older people held by younger people is that older people also are feeble-minded. Older people are prone to short-term memory loss or just general degradation of cognition. 

As Amy Lee, then the head of customer experience for web at AARP said in her forward to our report: 

“The existing heuristics seemed to me to be focused on people’s disabilities rather than on people’s abilities. Not everyone over 50 has eyesight poor enough to require maximizing the size or contrast of text of a web page. Not every person over 50 has problems with motor control or significant short term memory loss. The diversity of this demographic group is stunning. Not everyone over 50 is new to the Web or afraid of their computer. Why are we trying to lump them all together like that?” 

I was in my early 40s when Ginny and I did this work. I am now in my early 60s. The empirical evidence stands up to what we learned then. I think I’m way smarter now, much quicker on analysis and critical thinking that I was then. This is wisdom (or it could be my own perception through some age-related degradation like early dementia – you tell me).  My eyesight is actually better than it was then. Turns out that the shape of your eyes change over time, and sometimes that is in your favor. Unfortunately, the genes I inherited from my wonderful parents included markers for arthritis. From both of them. I  feel this every day. It does not impede my ability to use the web. 

In 2025, websites, apps, and other technologies are still pretty unusable by lots of people. This is largely because they are made by people who are not their users and because those well-intentioned designers and product people are not learning from people who have lived experiences. And, as technology gains more features and functionality, it comes with more complexity not more simplicity. 

Some takeaways and a model for designing for everyone, including older adults

I’m going to link to all the reports from the work that Ginny and I did, but that’s not the same as directly observing individuals interacting with a thing that someone has designed. 

Our heuristics were informed by also observing older adults interacting with AARP.org and other sites. Among the insights I gained that linger with me today are these: 

  • People perceive “old” as about 20 years older than they are. 
  • Age is a moving target. You don’t turn 50 and fall apart. Different things happen (or not) to people at a range of ages and not all of them are strictly age-related. 
  • If we are lucky, all of us will get to experience aging. 
  • People who are in their 80s and 90s now used computers in their professions during their working years. They may still be happily in their working years. Some of them invented the technology we use today. 

But the big ah-ha that Ginny, Amy, and me had was that there were some simple factors to consider in the usability and accessibility of websites for older adults. At the time, we heuristically placed interactions on sites on scales that we used to try to capture the experience an older person might have. The factors were Age (because AARP), Ability, Aptitude, and Attitude. In our report, we described them this way: 

  • age: including chronological age, but taking into account life experiences 
  • ability: cognitive and physical
  • aptitude: expertise with the technology 
  • attitude: confidence levels and emotional state of mind 

Yes, chronological age is a kind of measure, but one 70-year-old might have amazing skin, excellent eyesight, and be able to run marathons because a combination of genes, privilege, and other factors. Another might have been exposed to environmental, genetic, or other factors that mean their mobility is restricted to being homebound. 

People of all ages struggle with using technology

Later, around 2008,  in some work I did for a company that was a pioneer in online learning, I applied this model to college students who were the audience for the startup’s prototype product. The participants aged in range from 18 to 30 (so-called “adult learners” who maybe were returning to get or complete degrees). What we saw was that age was not a factor at all in usability and accessibility of online tools and websites. 

We met 20-year-olds who were the perfect target audience for Facebook but didn’t know the first thing about how to interact with it, or why you would want to.  When we put them in front of our prototype, we saw no effect for age.  We did see effects for what we (and my friends at Fidelity) called “expertise.” Expertise came from a combination of ability, aptitude, and attitude. 

I have applied the model in formal and informal ways in studies since then and found the same thing: Age is not a factor in how well a design performs for older people. 

In the category of “everything old is new again,” I have had the delightful privilege of sharing my wisdom with lots exceptional designers and product people over the last several years. One thing that is not exceptional about them is that they, too, assume that older adults struggle with technology. So, it’s time to revive this work and get it out in the world again. 

AARP Audience-Centered Heuristics: Older adults (pdf, 106kb)
Twenty heuristics, each with several questions, from the following two studies.

Chisnell, D. and Redish, J. C., 2005, Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: Expert Review of Usability for Older Adults at 50 Web Sites. (pdf 1.8Mb)

Chisnell, D. and Redish, J. C., 2004, Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: A Review of Recent Research. (pdf, 397Kb)

You might also want to read our insights about recruiting and working with older participants in usability studies (pdf, 156Kb)

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Heuristics for understanding older adults as web users

In 2004, Ginny Redish and I, along with Amy Lee, conducted a review of the relevant literature — research by other people — about designing for older adults (people over age 50). Doing this changed my thinking about universal design.

It wasn’t enough to generate design heuristics. We also came up with ways to operationalize them. That is, you can actually test to see if you have implemented these design practices by answering several questions about each heuristic.

Here’s an article from Technical Communication (which, by the way, was the runner-up for best article of the year for that publication) in which we describe the project, list the heuristics, and talk about some of our results in using them.

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Designing for older adults: Reviewing 50 websites

 

AARP, an American organization for people over age 50, commissioned Ginny Redish and me to give them a scorecard of how well the Web was supporting older people in terms of design. We weren’t to evaluated sites only directed at older adults, but do conduct a broad review of sites that regular people might encounter on any given day, regardless of age.

Ginny and I came up with an unusual method to do this review: persona-based, task-driven heuristic evaluation. Very simply, we tried to take on the personalities of one of two personas, Matthew and Edith, as we did tasks they would do on sites they would normally visit. And then we rated those interactions against a set of heuristics for good design for older people.

See the results. Though this report was published several years ago (2005), the findings are pretty solid.

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Tools for plotting a future course of design, checking progress

“Let’s check this against the Nielsen guidelines for intranets,” she said. We were three quarters of the way through completing wireframes for a redesign. We had spent 4 months doing user research, card sorting, prototyping, iterating, and testing (a lot). At the time, going back to the Nielsen Norman Group guidelines seemed like a really good idea. “Okay,” I said. “I’m all for reviewing designs from different angles.”

There are 614 guidelines.

This was not a way to check designs to see if the team had gone in the right design direction.

 

Are you designing or inspecting?

They are not interchangeable, guidelines and heuristics, but many UXers treat them that way. It’s common to hear someone saying that they’re doing a heuristic evaluation against X guidelines. But it doesn’t quite work like that.

Designing is an act of creation, whether you’re doing research, drawing on graph paper, or coding CSS. Inspecting is an act of checking, of examining, often with some measure in mind.

Guidelines are statements of direction. They’re about looking to the future and what you want to incorporate in the design. Guidelines are aspirational, like these:

  • Add, update, and remove content frequently.
  • Provide persistent navigation controls.
  • Index all intranet pages.
  • Provide org charts that can be viewed onscreen as well as printed.*

Heuristics challenge a design with questions. The purpose of heuristics is to provide a way to “test” a design in the absence of data by making an inspection. Heuristics are about enforcement, like these:

Visibility of system status

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on…

Match between system and the real world

The system should speak the users’ language…*

User control and freedom

The system should provide a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state … **

 

Creating or diagnosing?

Heuristics are often cast as pass/fail tests. Does the UI comply or not? While you could use the usability.gov guidelines to evaluate web site designs, they were developed as tools for designing. They present things to think about as teams make decisions.

Both guidelines and heuristics are typically broad and interpretable. They’re built to apply to nearly interface. But they come into play at different points in a design project. Guidelines are things to think about in reaching a design; they are considerations and can interact with one another in interesting ways. Heuristics are usually diagnostic and generally don’t interact.

 

Don’t design by guidelines alone

For example, on the intranet project, we looked at guidelines about the home page. One directive says to put the most important new information on the home page, and the next one says to include key features and company news on the home page. A third says to include tools with information that changes every day. But earlier in the list of guidelines, we see a directive to be “judicious about having a designated ‘quick links’ area.” Guidelines may feel complementary to one another or some may seem to cancel others out. Taken together, there’s a set of complex decisions to make just about the home page.

And it was too late on our intranet to pay attention to every guideline. The decisions had been made, based on stakeholder input, business requirements, and technology constraints, as well as user requirements. Though we were thoughtful and thorough in designing, anyone scoring our site against the guidelines might not give us good marks.

 

Don’t evaluate by heuristics alone

Likewise, when looking at heuristics such as “be consistent,” there’s a case for conducting usability tests with real users. For example, on the intranet I was working on, one group in the client company was adamant about having a limited set of page templates, with different sections of the site meeting strict requirements for color, look, and feel. But in usability testing, participants couldn’t tell where they were in the site when they moved from section to section.

 

Guidance versus enforcement

What are you looking for at this point in your design project? In the intranet project, we were much closer to an evaluative mode than a creation mode (though we did continue to iterate). We needed something to help us measure how far we had come. Going back to the guidelines was not the checkpoint we were looking for.

We sallied forth. The client design team decided instead to create “heuristics” from items from the user and business requirements lists generated at the beginning of the project, making a great circle and a thoughtful cycle of research, design, and evaluation.

I don’t know whether the intranet we designed meets all of the guidelines. But users tell us and show us every day that it is easier, faster, and better than the old intranet. For now, that’s enough of a heuristic.

 

* From “Intranet Usability: Design Guidelines from Studies with Intranet Users” by Kara Pernice Coyne, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen

** From Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics, see http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

 

Related:

Where do heuristics come from?

What are you asking for when you ask for heuristic evaluation?

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Where do heuristics come from?

Recently I had the honor and pleasure of working on a project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop style guidelines for voting system documentation. Yawner, right? Not at all, it turns out. It made me think about where guidelines and heuristics come from for all kinds of design. Yes, if you live in the United States, you paid for me to find this out. Thank you.

What I learned in the process of developing style guidelines for voting system documentation (which, astonishingly took about a year) is that most heuristics — accepted principles — used in evaluating user interfaces come from three sources: Lore or folk wisdom, specialist experience, and research.

Continue reading “Where do heuristics come from?”

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What are you asking for when you ask for a heuristic evaluation?

Every usability professional I know gets requests to do heuristic evaluations. But it isn’t always clear that the requester actually knows what is involved in doing a heuristic evaluation. Some clients who have asked me to do them have picked up the term “heuristic evaluation” somewhere but often are not clear on the details. Typically, they have mapped “heuristic evaluation” to “usability audit,” or something like that. It’s close enough to start a conversation.

Continue reading “What are you asking for when you ask for a heuristic evaluation?”