Designing Age-Inclusive Products: Guidelines And Best Practices

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Dr. Michal Halperin Ben Zvi is a UX researcher and Design Strategist specializing in engaging older users. She contributed to developing various digital …
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Why is it so important to take into account older adults? One person in eight on the planet is over 60, and they are more online than ever. Approximately one billion people aged 60+ are alive today. Most of them are healthy and active and have discretionary income. Moreover, it is growing faster than any other age group and is projected to be 20% of the world’s population (~2 billion people) by 2050. They are also the fastest-growing category of e-commerce shoppers.

Older people today are adopting technology more than ever before. From the use of the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and wearables to smart TVs and speakers, a growing number of older people are users. Ownership of smartphones, for example, increased from 70% to 77% among the 50+ population in the United States between 2017 and 2021. Moreover, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a significant rise in older adults’ motivation to use digital technology.

However, many older people still lack sufficient Internet connectivity or technological skill to use devices and consume digital services. It is estimated that two in five feel technology is not designed for them (pdf).

Opportunity To Integrate Older people Into The Digital World

More and more aspects of life are conducted on digital platforms: interpersonal communication, banking, healthcare, personal consumption, and exercising one’s rights are just some of them. Therefore, digital platforms that are challenging to use for older people have a negative impact on their quality of life. It prevents them from accessing essential services and integrating equally into society.

If you adopt this principle, you can design a digital platform that serves a wide range of people, not just those aged 65+. Usually, a service that meets the needs of people aged 65+ will serve other audiences as well.

Adopting Age-appropriate Navigation And Orientation Practices

Advancing age can also bring with it a decrease in the rate of information processing, whether in understanding, thinking, or remembering. Plus, the ability to ignore distractions, focus on one stimulus, and perform several complex actions simultaneously also decreases.

Additionally, due to their age, some suffer from a decrease in executive functions that enable planning, executing, and delaying reactions. Therefore, there is a higher chance they will perform random actions such as clicking on unintended places, closing pages, or making errors when using apps. Some may have difficulty understanding that icons carry the same meaning across different apps or in dealing with situations that do not correspond with their expectations of the digital world. Despite such difficulties, it is essential to stress that the ability to learn from feedback — for example, via affirmations — does not diminish with age.

What Should We Do If We Want To Increase Their Engagement?

Here are a few guidelines to help you design a more inclusive product. Those guidelines can increase the usage of younger users but are highly crucial for older users:

Minimize The Number Of Required Actions And Create Shortcuts

Some people over 65 find it challenging to cope with information overload and multiple options.

Proper information architecture and hierarchy will indicate what is important to the user and require less effort. We should ensure that the required actions appear immediately and easily so that the user does not have to search for them. Some important ones to mention are white space, content placement, space, language, number of actions, and others. Below are these and some others listed with explanations: