Web Usability for Older Users

I've come across this interesting article on the "SitePoint" website, regarding a study into web usability for older users:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/improve-usability-older-users

"We recently analysed and compared the results of 16 usability testing sessions. Eight of these sessions were conducted with older users (i.e. over the age of 65), and the other eight were run with younger users (under the age of 40).

The 40-minute 'talk-aloud' sessions involved our asking participants to find information on a range of government web sites. The results of this research provided insights into the ways older users differ from their younger counterparts when it comes to using the Internet."

The results of their findings are summarised as follows:

Assigning Blame

• Older users were more likely to assign blame when using the Internet.
• Three of the eight older participants blamed themselves for any difficulties they encountered ("I don't really know what I'm doing"; "It's probably my fault"; "This always happens to me").
• Four of the older users seemed to blame the site(s) for any difficulties they encountered ("I hate it when websites do this"; "Well, that's stupid"; "That doesn't make any sense").
• Younger users were far less likely to assign explicit blame for any difficulties they encountered, with just one blaming himself.

Emotional Reaction

• Older users were more likely to assign blame when using the Internet.
• Only two of the younger participants expressed themselves in comparably strong terms (both when talking negatively about aspects of a site).

Weaker Mental Models

• Six of the older participants regularly failed to scroll down a page (i.e. did not do so six or more times in a session). This failure often led these participants to miss information that was directly relevant to their task.
• None of the younger participants failed to scroll down a page six or more times in a session.
• This is likely to be attributable to older users not having fully internalised the concept that browser windows often requiring scrolling - a concept that's novel to computer technology.

Technical Language

• Older users were less likely to understand technical language. For instance, a moderator's request to "bring up the minimised window" was not understood by five older users (in comparison to its not being understood by only two of the younger users).
• Older users were at least twice as likely as younger users not to understand the phrases 'Homepage', 'URL' and 'Browser'.

Link Identification

• Older participants were more likely to click on elements of a page that weren't links (an average of 14 times per session, in comparison to the younger participants' average of five times per session).
• Older users reported preferring websites that changed the colour of their visited links, whereas only five of the younger participants considered the matter significant.

Aversion to Downloading

• Of the eight older participants, five expressed a strong aversion to downloading documents from the Internet because they were "worried about bugs [i.e. viruses] and things."
• None of the younger participants expressed such views.

Higher Incidence of 'Search' Usage

• Of the younger participant group, only two individuals used the available search functionality
• Six of the older participant group chose to make use of it. It is possible that this may have developed as a means of compensating for their apparent difficulties or discomfort with traditional browsing.
• It should be noted that all users expected a site to have a single 'Search' function that searched all of the site's content.

Slow Task-completion and Reading

• Older participants required over double the average time of our younger participants to complete a task.
• Three of the older participants also displayed a tendency to read all of the text on a page before being willing to decide on their next course of action. None of the younger participants did this.

Preference for 'Big and Simple' Design

• Seven of the older participants reported anything less than 12-point type as being too small to read comfortably - and even though all users agreed that being able to re-size the text on the screen would be a good idea, only one of them knew how to do so through the browser.

We should consider some of these issues when designing our product.