Usability professionals have many of the same preconceptions about aging and technology use as those exhibited by people in other professions.
Although slowed with aging, difficulties in suppressing irrelevant information, affecting attention span and memory retention, are found in all age groups.
We need to understand the mechanisms that underlie the physical and mental changes of aging to design products that interface well with older adults’ cognitive abilities.
Field testing and field research work especially well with older adults, if you are sensitive to their needs in both the recruiting and data collection process.
An interview with Terry Carson, the owner of residential facilities for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
To reduce problems of navigational disorientation, incorporate different sets of orientation factors and accommodate the needs and abilities of all users.
To enable a rapidly aging population with the connected social experiences that younger Web users experience, find balance between replacing and augmenting offline activity.
A review of research into overlaps between the accessibility needs of older users and people with disabilities showed that WCAG 2.0 meets most of the identified requirements of older web users. The article introduces the WAI-AGE project.
As we age, we are constantly compromising, and redefining what we view as living.
With the aging of the baby boomers, product developers are realizing that there’s money to be made by making products more user-friendly to older people.