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)