7 ms·

Creating Online Environments That Work Well for Older Users

87 points by imgabe 7y ago

codyogden 7y ago
These seem like good recommendations for midlife to older age group. I really wish we had more user research that backs up some of these recommendations. I’ve been doing a lot of research on text polarity readability (dark-on-light vs light-on-dark), and the color/text recommendations seem to follow the findings I’m seeing in that area. It’d be interesting to see a larger study with greater than 20-40 participants with detailed age group breakdowns.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  It would also be good to bear in mind that First World demographics are already and increasingly skewed toward older age groups.
sys_64738 7y ago
"Part of the reason why Amazon.com has taken over the retail world is because over the last decade the user experience has remained consistent and predictable." This. The number of times I've seen somebody think they're doing the right thing by "redesigning" a web interface is absurd. Don't do it.
- generalpass 7y ago
  Drudge Report
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe some people are too blinded by their politics to think objectively. The fact is that, visually speaking, Drudge Report has been the Craigslist of news for almost a quarter of a century. A big reason for its success is that it is easy and familiar to use, which is particularly attractive to its target demographic.
    - generalpass 7y ago
      I guess one advantage to being highly partisan is when you do something within your product that directly helps with its success, nobody will copy it.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        Eh, there's https://lite.cnn.com/en/ https://lite.cnn.com/en/, but it's not well advertised. It's not quite the same deal, it's not a link aggregator and actually has less formatting/images/etc than Drudge, but I think it's getting a similar minimalist aesthetic.
        generalpass 7y ago
        Minimalistic, yes, but I don't think that's exactly what Drudge is doing. Drudge Report is formatted like a newspaper front page, which is an evolved format and one that his readers are already familiar with.
    - Cougher 7y ago
      If people don't like the Drudge example, perhaps they might like Antiwar.com. It may look confusing at first, but it's the same format that they've used since their beginning and it works.
- nilram 7y ago
  Whenever I get usability surveys for websites, unless there’s something really egregious, I tell them to not change a thing. Especially when it’s a bank or utility. I’m going there to check a balance or pay a bill. Do I really need a change up every 18 months to meet the latest UI paradigm? I’m all for the full employment of programmers, but find something else to do than float the ‘pay bill’ and ‘logout’ links to meet this week’s subjective ideal.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    For me it’s “download the latest bill as a PDF” and “pay bill”. Invariably whenever there’s a redesign the first of those two functions gets buried further in the site.
- tapland 7y ago
  Pocket Casts still gets me, and I encountered really weird behavior and have no idea how to fix it just a few days ago. Not sure if I'm getting old, but if that's it I understand grumpy old people feeling righteous anger at changes.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  I find Amazon.com to have turned into a mess. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to search only for items sold by Amazon.com. And on the product's page itself, it's confusing to figure out who is selling it. I'm pretty sure they keep moving it to confuse people.
  - Cougher 7y ago
    And that mess of a model is being emulated by vendors like Walmart. One of the advantages of Walmart is that I can get in my car and go there today, but they've destroyed their own advantage by making it harder to see what your local store has in stock.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Yes, hence I prefer to use target.com and staples.com and bestbuy.com. Supposedly target.com is going that way too though, which would suck. The good news is many manufacturers now allow you to purchase directly from their website.
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  An interesting contrast with Steve Yegge's claim [0] (shared here the other day [1]) that Bezos micromanages the homepage and won't allow change (obviously, both could be true). [0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986
politelemon 7y ago
Well written with simple and clear explanations. I found this as a timely complementary/addon to another recent HN thread, "The modern web is becoming unusable" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848468 Coincidentally, some of these principles are similar to what we have to apply for our B2B software, as a lot of the target audience are in a similar age group as author, continuing to work on older hardware. Having to continuously explain this to young developers entering the workforce is not easy, as the implications of various tech decisions and their impact on customers is not always obvious to them.
every 7y ago
As a certified "aged one" of seven decades I'm familiar with this. I think of it as simply another accessibility issue. I believe it is unreasonable to expect designers to adhere to any particular standard. They have stuff to sell and audiences to please and since the old often fall outside that demographic, they can be safely ignored. I think it is more important for the older user to have tools that can mitigate the situation as needed: the ability to easily adjust screen resolutions, increase contrast or switch to a plain text display without distractions. I would be happy with that...
- dgzl 7y ago
  My grandma owns a tax consulting business and began using computers in the age of Dos. Over the years I would end up with her old computers and that's essentially how I became familiar with them when I was young. About the time I graduated with my CS degree, I realized something.... My grandma isn't actually that capable with computers. Even though she's literally been using them longer than I have, she had only really been performing a few tasks beyond get work, and never really spent time using or learning the nuances of computers and operating systems. I think she never really caught on to the changes Windows and web browsers made over the years, and she just stuck to her work. Now, you might not tell her apart from someone who just started learning.
  - jes5199 7y ago
    that feels, to me, like a real failure of our field. What other tool can you use every day for 30 years and still be a novice at?
    - confidantlake 7y ago
      Most of them. I use a toilet every day and have no idea how it works except for I push the button and my shit goes away.
      - noman-land 7y ago
        To be fair, the toilet hasn't changed much in the last 30 years but computing has drastically changed.
RenRav 7y ago
I usually hit the Reader View button within firefox if a page is unreadable. Returns a standard looking plain webpage, black text on white background at whatever font size I have it scaled up to. Google's text-only cached results also help sometimes.
- mrob 7y ago
  I usually hit the Reader View button even when it's already readable. I'm not the slightest bit interested in what some designer thinks the page should look like. Even if they come up with something good, it's still inconvenient because it's different. Reader View still has gray text though, unless changed with userContent.css: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853840
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  > black text on white background It seems to use the colors provided by the desktop environment, actually. I'm using MATE with its BlackMATE theme and reader view is white text on black bg for me (which is what I prefer). The browser's preferences itself are set to black-on-white (simply because almost all websites would break otherwise), hence why I'm assuming it must be using MATE's colors.
dehrmann 7y ago
> I prefer text over video because I can absorb and retain information faster by reading than by watching YouTube I'm in my mid-30's and generally agree. The number of five-minute Youtube tutorials for something I can read and grok--and I'm not a fast reader--in 30 seconds baffles me. And they rank higher than text in search results.
- j45 7y ago
  YouTube doesn’t represent video as a medium for communicating effectively very well. Why? On problem with YouTube video is it’s less and less effective when there is incentiveization to increase the length of videos for ad slots. Take a 2 minute video and turn it into 10. How long do we wait for the 30 or 60 seconds of a YouTube video that we’re really after? Too often a few minutes.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Reminds me of watching Mythbusters.
    - Wistar 7y ago
      Bingo! There is an ever-growing number of shows that manage to take a 60-second concept and turn it into a 10-minute bore through endless empty detours and pointless "interview" format interjections. "How The Universe Works" is a prime example of this tedious format. A little decoration is fine, but, in general, I want to watch stuff more like the BBC's excellent Jim Al-Khalili-hosted shows.
  - ProZsolt 7y ago
    I really like LockPickingLawyer's videos [1]. It's no-frills, as all youtube videos should be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
    - j45 7y ago
      This is a great example of short content that draws you into wanting to watch longer content to get deeper insight.
toastal 7y ago
Old man Linux is the vibe I'm striving to live for; keep holding onto that 4GB laptop.
- randycupertino 7y ago
  > Old man Linux ^ that would be a pretty decent HN username!
8bitsrule 7y ago
A useful addon for people with vision problems is a text/background contrast stretching algorithm. And/or an addon which can be adjusted for darkness and color prefs. One example of each for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  I think the article addressed this. Any time the reader has to reach for an add-on or click some other button to make your site readable, they're more likely to just go elsewhere. After all, quit a bit of the article talks about font sizes and colour contrasts -- both easily fixed by flipping to Reader Mode (I assume Chrome has something similar?) but really, how often do I do that? Hardly ever... the reading matter has to be reeeally compelling for me to bother with that. Any friction at all is still a friction.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    I hear ya. And I think that web accessibility has gotten better in the last year. But many sites are still squint-ville. Yep, Reader is really great for seeing the main article on a page, no question. But sometimes there's a lot left aside. And you just need a little help seeing it. Take a look at the 'Dark/Light' addon, I've used all day every day for over a year. Very little fiddling involved. You get to set the background, text, and link colors for everything. Finito, all problems solved (apart from using control-scroll to zoom font-size).
signal11 7y ago
Poor contrast (gray on gray) is a big problem, as is tiny text. Not everyone has 20/20 vision -- many people, even with glasses or contacts, don't, because they have uncorrectable vision difficulties -- their doctors will not recommend surgery because the risk/reward isn't worth it, or simply because there is no cure (lots of eye conditions end up diagnosed as 'idiopathic', medical-speak for 'unknown'). Designers with 20/20 vision reading this -- please consider asking around to see if you can find a tester who doesn't have 20/20 vision. Alternatively just check for contrast and maybe view at 75% zoom and see if your design is still readable (Amazon is surprisingly usable at 50%).
lowercased 7y ago
Maybe we could have 'creating video content that works well for older users' too... ? I've got a 47" TV - typically sit around 7-8 feet away. Many - probably most - tv shows and movies that will add text (spy thriller movies, date/locations/years, etc) invariably use incredibly small fonts, and seem not to care about contrast. Small white text on a picture of a cloudy sky is simply unreadable. It doesn't matter how close I sit - it's essentially white on white. #f6f6f6 on #fdfdfd. This is unreadable, but movie and tv producers seem perfectly OK with this trend.
withinboredom 7y ago
Something this article completely misses: double-clicking. I don't know how many bugs I've fixed over the years that were simply caused by double-clicking even though every single developer around me didn't believe that could be the cause. Older people double click on things, even though my sample size is small, it's 100% of them. My Grandma, the owner of a startup I used to work at, my Grandma's friends, etc...
Cougher 7y ago
How about a readable notification bar for Androids? It would have helped me see that my charger cable was bad before I ventured outside in the cold with no way to recharge my dead phone.

87 points by imgabe 7y ago

These seem like good recommendations for midlife to older age group. I really wish we had more user research that backs up some of these recommendations. I’ve been doing a lot of research on text polarity readability (dark-on-light vs light-on-dark), and the color/text recommendations seem to follow the findings I’m seeing in that area. It’d be interesting to see a larger study with greater than 20-40 participants with detailed age group breakdowns.

mikro2nd 7y ago
It would also be good to bear in mind that First World demographics are already and increasingly skewed toward older age groups.

sys_64738 7y ago

"Part of the reason why Amazon.com has taken over the retail world is because over the last decade the user experience has remained consistent and predictable." This. The number of times I've seen somebody think they're doing the right thing by "redesigning" a web interface is absurd. Don't do it.

generalpass 7y ago
Drudge Report
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe some people are too blinded by their politics to think objectively. The fact is that, visually speaking, Drudge Report has been the Craigslist of news for almost a quarter of a century. A big reason for its success is that it is easy and familiar to use, which is particularly attractive to its target demographic.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    I guess one advantage to being highly partisan is when you do something within your product that directly helps with its success, nobody will copy it.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      Eh, there's https://lite.cnn.com/en/ https://lite.cnn.com/en/, but it's not well advertised. It's not quite the same deal, it's not a link aggregator and actually has less formatting/images/etc than Drudge, but I think it's getting a similar minimalist aesthetic.
      - generalpass 7y ago
        Minimalistic, yes, but I don't think that's exactly what Drudge is doing. Drudge Report is formatted like a newspaper front page, which is an evolved format and one that his readers are already familiar with.
  - Cougher 7y ago
    If people don't like the Drudge example, perhaps they might like Antiwar.com. It may look confusing at first, but it's the same format that they've used since their beginning and it works.
nilram 7y ago
Whenever I get usability surveys for websites, unless there’s something really egregious, I tell them to not change a thing. Especially when it’s a bank or utility. I’m going there to check a balance or pay a bill. Do I really need a change up every 18 months to meet the latest UI paradigm? I’m all for the full employment of programmers, but find something else to do than float the ‘pay bill’ and ‘logout’ links to meet this week’s subjective ideal.
- pbourke 7y ago
  For me it’s “download the latest bill as a PDF” and “pay bill”. Invariably whenever there’s a redesign the first of those two functions gets buried further in the site.
tapland 7y ago
Pocket Casts still gets me, and I encountered really weird behavior and have no idea how to fix it just a few days ago. Not sure if I'm getting old, but if that's it I understand grumpy old people feeling righteous anger at changes.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
I find Amazon.com to have turned into a mess. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to search only for items sold by Amazon.com. And on the product's page itself, it's confusing to figure out who is selling it. I'm pretty sure they keep moving it to confuse people.
- Cougher 7y ago
  And that mess of a model is being emulated by vendors like Walmart. One of the advantages of Walmart is that I can get in my car and go there today, but they've destroyed their own advantage by making it harder to see what your local store has in stock.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Yes, hence I prefer to use target.com and staples.com and bestbuy.com. Supposedly target.com is going that way too though, which would suck. The good news is many manufacturers now allow you to purchase directly from their website.
lordgrenville 7y ago
An interesting contrast with Steve Yegge's claim [0] (shared here the other day [1]) that Bezos micromanages the homepage and won't allow change (obviously, both could be true). [0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986

politelemon 7y ago

Well written with simple and clear explanations. I found this as a timely complementary/addon to another recent HN thread, "The modern web is becoming unusable" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848468 Coincidentally, some of these principles are similar to what we have to apply for our B2B software, as a lot of the target audience are in a similar age group as author, continuing to work on older hardware. Having to continuously explain this to young developers entering the workforce is not easy, as the implications of various tech decisions and their impact on customers is not always obvious to them.

every 7y ago

As a certified "aged one" of seven decades I'm familiar with this. I think of it as simply another accessibility issue. I believe it is unreasonable to expect designers to adhere to any particular standard. They have stuff to sell and audiences to please and since the old often fall outside that demographic, they can be safely ignored. I think it is more important for the older user to have tools that can mitigate the situation as needed: the ability to easily adjust screen resolutions, increase contrast or switch to a plain text display without distractions. I would be happy with that...

dgzl 7y ago
My grandma owns a tax consulting business and began using computers in the age of Dos. Over the years I would end up with her old computers and that's essentially how I became familiar with them when I was young. About the time I graduated with my CS degree, I realized something.... My grandma isn't actually that capable with computers. Even though she's literally been using them longer than I have, she had only really been performing a few tasks beyond get work, and never really spent time using or learning the nuances of computers and operating systems. I think she never really caught on to the changes Windows and web browsers made over the years, and she just stuck to her work. Now, you might not tell her apart from someone who just started learning.
- jes5199 7y ago
  that feels, to me, like a real failure of our field. What other tool can you use every day for 30 years and still be a novice at?
  - confidantlake 7y ago
    Most of them. I use a toilet every day and have no idea how it works except for I push the button and my shit goes away.
    - noman-land 7y ago
      To be fair, the toilet hasn't changed much in the last 30 years but computing has drastically changed.

RenRav 7y ago

I usually hit the Reader View button within firefox if a page is unreadable. Returns a standard looking plain webpage, black text on white background at whatever font size I have it scaled up to. Google's text-only cached results also help sometimes.

mrob 7y ago
I usually hit the Reader View button even when it's already readable. I'm not the slightest bit interested in what some designer thinks the page should look like. Even if they come up with something good, it's still inconvenient because it's different. Reader View still has gray text though, unless changed with userContent.css: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853840
boring_twenties 7y ago
> black text on white background It seems to use the colors provided by the desktop environment, actually. I'm using MATE with its BlackMATE theme and reader view is white text on black bg for me (which is what I prefer). The browser's preferences itself are set to black-on-white (simply because almost all websites would break otherwise), hence why I'm assuming it must be using MATE's colors.

dehrmann 7y ago

> I prefer text over video because I can absorb and retain information faster by reading than by watching YouTube I'm in my mid-30's and generally agree. The number of five-minute Youtube tutorials for something I can read and grok--and I'm not a fast reader--in 30 seconds baffles me. And they rank higher than text in search results.

j45 7y ago
YouTube doesn’t represent video as a medium for communicating effectively very well. Why? On problem with YouTube video is it’s less and less effective when there is incentiveization to increase the length of videos for ad slots. Take a 2 minute video and turn it into 10. How long do we wait for the 30 or 60 seconds of a YouTube video that we’re really after? Too often a few minutes.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Reminds me of watching Mythbusters.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    Bingo! There is an ever-growing number of shows that manage to take a 60-second concept and turn it into a 10-minute bore through endless empty detours and pointless "interview" format interjections. "How The Universe Works" is a prime example of this tedious format. A little decoration is fine, but, in general, I want to watch stuff more like the BBC's excellent Jim Al-Khalili-hosted shows.
- ProZsolt 7y ago
  I really like LockPickingLawyer's videos [1]. It's no-frills, as all youtube videos should be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
  - j45 7y ago
    This is a great example of short content that draws you into wanting to watch longer content to get deeper insight.

toastal 7y ago

Old man Linux is the vibe I'm striving to live for; keep holding onto that 4GB laptop.

randycupertino 7y ago
> Old man Linux ^ that would be a pretty decent HN username!

8bitsrule 7y ago

A useful addon for people with vision problems is a text/background contrast stretching algorithm. And/or an addon which can be adjusted for darkness and color prefs. One example of each for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

mikro2nd 7y ago
I think the article addressed this. Any time the reader has to reach for an add-on or click some other button to make your site readable, they're more likely to just go elsewhere. After all, quit a bit of the article talks about font sizes and colour contrasts -- both easily fixed by flipping to Reader Mode (I assume Chrome has something similar?) but really, how often do I do that? Hardly ever... the reading matter has to be reeeally compelling for me to bother with that. Any friction at all is still a friction.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  I hear ya. And I think that web accessibility has gotten better in the last year. But many sites are still squint-ville. Yep, Reader is really great for seeing the main article on a page, no question. But sometimes there's a lot left aside. And you just need a little help seeing it. Take a look at the 'Dark/Light' addon, I've used all day every day for over a year. Very little fiddling involved. You get to set the background, text, and link colors for everything. Finito, all problems solved (apart from using control-scroll to zoom font-size).

signal11 7y ago

Poor contrast (gray on gray) is a big problem, as is tiny text. Not everyone has 20/20 vision -- many people, even with glasses or contacts, don't, because they have uncorrectable vision difficulties -- their doctors will not recommend surgery because the risk/reward isn't worth it, or simply because there is no cure (lots of eye conditions end up diagnosed as 'idiopathic', medical-speak for 'unknown'). Designers with 20/20 vision reading this -- please consider asking around to see if you can find a tester who doesn't have 20/20 vision. Alternatively just check for contrast and maybe view at 75% zoom and see if your design is still readable (Amazon is surprisingly usable at 50%).

lowercased 7y ago

Maybe we could have 'creating video content that works well for older users' too... ? I've got a 47" TV - typically sit around 7-8 feet away. Many - probably most - tv shows and movies that will add text (spy thriller movies, date/locations/years, etc) invariably use incredibly small fonts, and seem not to care about contrast. Small white text on a picture of a cloudy sky is simply unreadable. It doesn't matter how close I sit - it's essentially white on white. #f6f6f6 on #fdfdfd. This is unreadable, but movie and tv producers seem perfectly OK with this trend.

withinboredom 7y ago

Something this article completely misses: double-clicking. I don't know how many bugs I've fixed over the years that were simply caused by double-clicking even though every single developer around me didn't believe that could be the cause. Older people double click on things, even though my sample size is small, it's 100% of them. My Grandma, the owner of a startup I used to work at, my Grandma's friends, etc...

Cougher 7y ago

How about a readable notification bar for Androids? It would have helped me see that my charger cable was bad before I ventured outside in the cold with no way to recharge my dead phone.