Author: Susan Weinschenk

Jim is 70 years old. He’s setting up an account to listen to music with an online music app. He’s on the security screen and the form asks him to pick security questions to set up an account and type in the answers. He has to pick two questions from the following choices: To the…

Unlike vision, motor skills don’t decline until the mid-60s. (One exception is if you have a disease that affects motor skills, such as Parkinson’s.) Priscila Caçola (2013) tested young, middle-aged, and older (over 65) people. She had them perform various fine motor movements, including finger tapping, while having to recognize and order numbers. She tested…

A total of 365 million people globally have hearing problems, and one-quarter of those (90 million) are over age 65. If you’re designing a product that has an auditory component, be mindful that not everyone will be able to hear it. This is especially problematic if you have audio or video that’s critical to using…

Another type of vision issue that occurs when people get older is that their color vision declines. It becomes harder to distinguish colors that are similar and the color blue becomes faded. It’s not a good idea, therefore, to use the color blue as a code, and even worse to use blue and similar colors…

Presbyopia is often called farsightedness. Starting at age 40, the eyes lose the ability to focus on objects that are nearby. This is because the lens of the eye starts to harden. Presbyopia starts sometime after 40 and gets worse until about age 65 when it stays, but stabilizes. If you’re under 40, it’s hard…

Let’s say you come over to visit at my house. It’s getting dark and I ask you to turn on a lamp that’s next to your chair. I phrase the request as, “Would you please turn on the electric lamp?” You might wonder why I would call it an “electric lamp.” Why didn’t I just…

Andrew Reed researched age differences in preference for the number of choices (2013). Across a variety of different types of decisions, older people preferred fewer choices compared to younger people. The age range was 18 to 90. The lessening in desire for choices was a linear relationship: the older people were, the fewer choices they…

Figure 83.1 shows Google and Figure 83.2 shows Naver. Which search engine visual design do you prefer? FIGURE 83.1 Google search engine home page. FIGURE 83.2 Naver search engine. Naver.com is the search engine for South Korea. Google is the search engine for lots of other places. Whether you found the Google design more visually…

Here are some facts about video and online gamers as of 2022 (from the ESA – The Entertainment Software Association): Geographic Differences According to the explodingtopics.com website, Asia has the most gamers, (probably because Asia has more people than other parts of the world). And Japan and the UK have the highest percentages of gaming…

Several organizations, include GSMA and the Pew research center conduct research on the gender gap in cell phone and smartphone use as well as access online in general. The gender gap is related to geographical region. In some areas (some parts of Europe and the US), there is very little to no gender gap in…