
Generation UX – How to make websites age-friendly - OJ_WhatUsersDo
http://whatusersdo.com/blog/make-websites-age-friendly/
======
boomlinde
As sort of a sidenote: websites about UX seem to have the worst UX. Clicking
the link, I'm not only met by a social sharing bar that uses 1/6th of the
screen and screws scrolling up (because for some reason it should follow
through my scrolling but somehow only be visible when scrolling upwards), but
a faux-chat window overlaying the content where a Tom is asking me how he can
help me. Not at all, thank you. At least being so up-front about how
absolutely terrible your website is means I didn't stay long enough for a
modal asking me to subscribe to their newsletter to pop up.

Does anyone actually believe that this crap leads to a better user experience?
Are UX concepts and standards so inbred that the people involved just can't
separate chocolate pudding from excrement anymore?

~~~
vogt
As a UX designer I have seen a lot of this stuff over the years and I always
find it funny. DesignerNews.com, which is an imitation of this site, is chock
full of articles like this.

The big thing to understand is a lot of people in The Blogosphere(TM) who post
articles about UX don't really give a rip about anything other than the
pageviews whether it's for ad revenue, establishing themselves as a thought
leader, or trying to market their company. Even worse, there are some people
who don't even ACTUALLY know much about UX, they just want to post an article
about it to spread around LinkedIn and seem relevant by harping about the
importance of UX, etc.

Having said all that, if you sift through all the garbage there are some great
resources. Some of the big players in the space tend to do it well. InVision's
blog, for example. UXPin are pretty good. There are lots of little ones like
UXPowerTools' content marketing emails that are starting to do a good job as
well.

At this point as someone who is always trying to improve as a UX designer, I
have become accustomed to vetting the 100:1 ratio of garbage articles to bad
ones.

~~~
cgriswald
I literally know nothing about UX, but I have to say a visit to UXPin's
website instantly turned me off. First, they put this great big demand for my
email front and center when I barely even know what their site is (and a
single line explaining it is not enough to get me to sign up). The entire
website is covered over with "modal grey" with no X box or anything else
showing me I can close it, just some links at the top that are not obviously
clickable because of the grey modal. Turns out it isn't a modal at all you can
just scroll down (no indication of that) and that the small links are
clickable. Once I was past that, it was fine and dandy, but if I were actually
interested in being a customer rather than a curious person trying to figure
out what I was missing, I probably would have just left.

~~~
vogt
Yeah, the product isn't great. To the point about UX blogs though, theirs is
pretty solid
[https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/](https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/). It
isn't bogged down by social sharing widgets, scroll jacking, or pop ups (last
I checked)

~~~
unexistance
besides the floating header that eats-up my precious vertical screen real-
estate, the blog content seems great...

thanks for the link

------
primo44
Now if only the Google maps (mobile version) devs would read this. On Android
anyway, no matter how much you zoom the text labels on things like street and
highway numbers will not enlarge. 5 years ago that wasn't the case.

~~~
Pxtl
To be fair, it makes sense that Google Maps would have distinct concepts for
"zooming in to the map" that would be separate from "resizing font".

The inverse problem exists on the browser, though - there's no way to resize
the viewport on mobile.

~~~
matrix
Sure, but I think the font should be (to some extent) scaled proportionally to
the map area or perhaps some other way of making the text larger. A typical
use case for me is zooming in on a highway to see what exit number a
particular ramp is. Today that info is basically unreadable on either
platform.

~~~
richardwhiuk
On the other hand, I don't want to see giant a 'D' over where I live because
on a far out zoom level it happens to say 'UNITED KINGDOM', and someone wanted
to zoom in to see the font.

------
ianaphysicist
Noted is the distraction from automatically changing carousels. I've found
this a major area of concern -- not just carousels but any autoplay content,
automatic slides, and text marquees. And beyond distraction, these elements
assume a specific pace of reading and require the user to build UI
understanding to get back to interesting content they glimpsed in passing. If
the content is compelling enough to display, it's compelling enough to present
well.

~~~
YCode
Yet inevitably every middle manager thinks carousels are a great idea.

I'm convinced 9 times out of 10 carousels are installed because the customer
got sick of looking at their own site.

~~~
squid_ca
I'll give you 5 times out of 10. The other 5 is the designer's solution to
trying to fit 10 different stakeholder's crap "above the fold."

~~~
Etab
We once built a site (for a major consumer brand) where the client insisted on
so many carousel slides that they started duplicating slides in the lineup
because it had been too long since they’d been seen.

(Our recommendation was to avoid a carousel, but the client had to have it!)

------
Animats
Today's really broken web site - Bank of America online banking. I'm running
Firefox 53 (latest version), with Ghostery and Privacy Badger, on Ubuntu
Linux. BofA's site had worked well for years. Then they added some new
features. Not good ones.

BofA's site now complains I'm using an "unsupported browser", even though they
claim to support Firefox. About half the time, login just hangs. Refreshing
the page shows a logged-in state.

When transferring funds from one account to another, sometimes the transfer
process hangs. The "Approve transfer" button darkens, but the page is not
refreshed. Sometimes the transfer has taken place, and sometimes it hasn't.

Yesterday, I did a transfer between accounts, and reached this situation. I
looked at the account status and didn't see the outgoing transfer listed. So I
re-did the transfer, and then saw the outgoing transfer listed. I printed the
account transaction history.

Today I get a warning that an account is overdrawn. Checking account status, I
find that there are now two identical transfers between the accounts,
resulting in one being overdrawn and the other being overpaid. An hour of
phone calls, mostly on hold, was required to fix this mess.

BofA's web site is using TouchCommerce ("Engage with your customers the way
they want to engage") Adobe Audience Manager ("Build audience profiles that
you can use anywhere"), and Tealium ("a single approach to connecting data
across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time"). They've added ads for
"special offers". They use these even on live transaction pages, which is a
possible security flaw. Code from those sources produces huge numbers of
browser errors (the obsolete "star property hack" for IE6 causes many of them)
indicating sloppy code.

Sigh. May be time to change banks.

------
chiph
"Congratulations, here's your first set of glasses" \- the present I got when
I turned 50.

While the site focuses on seniors, a lot of the suggestions are good ones in
any case - fonts larger than legalese and with good contrast will make your
page more easily approachable and less likely to lose viewers who get
frustrated because they can't read what you're trying to say.

~~~
fastball
Honestly, I've worn glasses all my life, and it's never occurred to me that,
when I'm not wearing my glasses, the websites are the one's at fault for not
making themselves more readable.

I think "web developers should make things more readable" is addressing the
symptom and not the problem. The solution is simple when it comes to
readability: wear corrective lenses.

~~~
my_first_acct
As you get older, a few things happen.

First, as your eyes lose the ability to focus (which is a gradual process, not
a step change), you find that over time you need more and more lenses: one for
objects at 18 inches (your laptop), one for objects at 24 inches (your
monitor), etc. You don't always have the proper lenses at hand when you need
them.

Second, all the transparent bits of the eyes slowly become less transparent
with time. Some problems (cataracts for instance) can be fixed with surgery;
others would require replacing the entire eyeball.

Third, a number of unlucky people develop problems with their retinas, which
may or may not be fixable, and the fixes rarely leave the retina in as good a
shape as it was when it was younger.

So "wear corrective lenses" is not a bad suggestion, but if web designers are
targeting older people, they need to assume the the reader's eyes are not what
they once were, and that there may not be much that the reader can do about
it.

------
Vinalin
I think something mentioned in the article that's usually not mentioned is the
loss of motor skills as you age. I find that for myself, a 20-something year
old web developer, it's easy to fall into the 'Everyone on the internet is
like me' mindset. However I try to maintain perspective by observing my
grandparents as they browse the internet on their iPads. The loss of motor
skills is easily one of the most frustrating parts of web browsing for them.
If they have to try more than twice to click your small hamburger menu that
you put conveniently right next to the 'Log out' button, they'll simply give
up and move on to the next thing.

An example of what I feel is an elegant solution - They used to have the
hardest time playing/pausing YouTube videos when they would rely only on the
buttons. However, once I showed them how to play/pause by clicking the entire
video, they were relieved and much more appreciative of the technology. I
think that this approach is more sound; instead of simply making everything
larger, or having larger clickboxes, simply create multiple ways to interact
with the content that doesn't interfere with other users. Nobody is upset that
you can play/pause videos by clicking on them, but I imagine they would be if
the play/pause buttons were 5x larger than they are now.

------
rdiddly
Here I foolishly hoped for some evidence of true understanding of the aged.
Unfortunately the tl;dr is: 1) News flash, old people are out there, they have
money, and some of them even know how to go online. 2) We need a term for this
new species... I know, how about 'digiboomers!' 3) An old person is basically
a collection of disabilities you need to plan around. 4) In light of 3) when
an old person abandons a task it's probably because they're bewildered, not
because your game is weak. (Not a word on how to address deficiencies in your
content, that their lifetime of experience will enable them to pick up
instantly. Or their experience and subsequent impatience with scams, marketing
and bullshit. Or the higher level of quality and depth they're seeking in all
arenas. Or for that matter, what they're like or what's important to them.)

------
gwbas1c
Translation: Stop getting creative. Make functional websites, not art
projects.

~~~
a3n
OMG yes, to your last sentence at least.

I like an attractive web site, but only as long as I can read it instantly.

------
jpmattia
Something that should have been explicit on the vision topic: Disabling pinch-
zoom guarantees some fraction of people with vision issues (of all ages) are
just going to disengage.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Agreed, I wish the browser would just not allow this to be disabled.

------
ryanar
The article focuses on over 55s who have money to spend online. I liked the
part that spoke to how 40 year olds and up are less likely to explore a
website and more likely to abandon a task.

I run into this a lot when I watch how my older users interact with our site.
They act like they are about to hit the nuke button when performing some
actions on the site, and I am sitting there thinking it is totally fine, even
if you mess up you can just go back. But there is so much anxiety around
accidentally messing something up that they would rather abandon the task than
do it.

I hope that I can continue to improve my skill in UI/UX because it is so
critical as a web developer.

~~~
erehweb
Suggestion - have a reasonably prominent button that restores defaults (or
whatever the analogue is). This is often a headache when dealing with systems
- easy to get into a situation where not obvious how to get back - e.g. window
minimized and can't find it again.

------
GrinningFool
> Things you can do to make your website easier to use include making sure
> that clickable links and buttons have a decent clickable area, and that
> pages can be navigated using just the keyboard

Hah. I don't know why this receives mention - while I'd love it if it were
common practice, nobody actually thinks about this and it's unlikely to
change. And it's not just web sites: let's not forget the slew of Electron
apps where keyboard integration is nonexistent, partial, or an afterthought.

------
carsongross
The UX world has gone so far backwards, regardless of age, in the last five
years it's hard to know where to begin: flat design, washed out colors, thin
fonts, buttons that look like badges that look like input boxes that look like
borders, modals that take over the entire screen with only a faint x in the
upper right corner to indicate what is going on, input fields with internal
labels that disappear as soon as anything is entered, and on and on.

Just going back to bootstrap 2, for all its problems, would be a step forward
at this point.

~~~
cableshaft
I think simple flat design and simple color schemes was a good change,
personally. The rest I don't really disagree with.

~~~
FabHK
But you probably "grew up" with the prior, more easily discoverable interface
versions. (Remember that when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, he had to
explain the "flick to scroll" gesture, because it was so new - previously,
you'd have to touch a tiny triangle in the corner of the scroll view, with a
stylus, to scroll... :-)

When I gave my mom an iPad, which already came with the fancy new thin flat
iOS design, I had to first switch to a larger, fatter font _(thanks, Apple,
for making this possible in the Accessibility settings!),_ and then spend
quite some time explaining things, as many controls ("yes mom, that word is
actually a button you can press") and gestures were not easily discoverable.

The fat 3D buttons were much easier to discern. (Note that Apple also has a
"Button Shapes" settings in Accessibility to re-enable them, though not as
"3D". Maybe they could have a global "beginner" or "senior" setting that would
switch these settings over from pretty to functional and discoverable...)

~~~
ashark
iOS 6 was the pinnacle of iOS UI discoverability. I'm still baffled at some of
their decisions. That slide-to-unlock element was _perfection_. It _never_
needed to change because you almost certainly _can 't do any better_ (OK,
sure, using the home button to trigger unlock now is better, but as far as _on
the screen_ unlock initiators, that's _it_ ). Any kid or oldster immediately
understood it. And 3d-ish buttons are a thing _for a reason_. It's gotten a
little better since the WTF-is-this-shit days of iOS7, but not much.

It went from "what should my grandma use? Definitely an iPad, no question" to
"what should my grandma use? Ugh, god, a Chromebook I guess?"

Now force-touch, and new gestures, and crap sliding from the top and bottom of
the screen, on top of everything else. It's much easier to get lost in for
someone who's half-terrified of computers, which is still _lots of people_ ,
and I'm not sure it's much better for the rest of us, either.

------
makecheck
Accessible site design is the default state! It is only ruined by what
"designers" (pointlessly) _add_ to pages. The "how", therefore, is easy: stop
screwing with things.

Nobody asked your site to mess with my preferred font sizes or colors. Nobody
asked you to break or poorly reinvent the standard system controls, especially
since (at least on Macs) normal controls have strong accessibility support
built in.

------
m8rrsnt
Related rant: Can apps please stop making the back/play/forward buttons
microscopic and as close to each other as possible?

------
subaqua
also, when iOS started out, most apps responded to double-tap by expanding the
screen to near zero margin and enlarging the text; this no longer seems to
work the same way in both applications or on many web sites. PIA.

------
ozaark
Much of the issues in the article are solvable with basic ADA compliance and
structured information architecture.

Strange how a world of tech can easily forget its ability to spread to users
who need it most.

------
tomc1985
WTH is this trend where people splice garbage stock photos into text? It's
gotten considerably worse these past few years

------
andreapaiola
We did Bank4elder

[https://www.diginventa.it/i-progetti.html](https://www.diginventa.it/i-progetti.html)

[http://www.aal-europe.eu/projects/bank4older/](http://www.aal-
europe.eu/projects/bank4older/)

