Recently Kate and Jeff were invited by the Stanford University Computer Science Department to give a talk in the department’s “People, Computers, and Design” talk-series. The talk took place on January 10, 2014. Our talk was titled “Designing for Older Adults: Usability Considerations for Real Users“. It covered the following topics: Demographics: Age-breakdowns of users […]
Design Posts
A reporter from the Washington Post contacted me recently to talk about how people use smartphones. He was working on a story about the relationship between people and smartphones. His premise was that most people who have smartphones don’t understand or use most of the phone’s capabilities. Of course, I gave him an earful, some […]
A recent BayCHI session featured Don Norman, who has released a revised and expanded edition of his 25-year old classic, The Design of Everyday Things. Although the entire talk was fascinating, I was particularly struck by a couple of topics. A Little White Lie? This was definitely an audience consisting of people who totally believe […]
My article, Designing User Interfaces for Older Adults: Myth Busters, was published by UXmatters.com on October 7, 2013. In it, I describe why factoring the older population into design considerations is essential, just in terms of their numbers and how important they are to businesses, the marketplace, and the world. I present, and then debunk, […]
Ruth Ellison wrote “Future-proof: Designing for an Ageing Population” as part of a wonderful original series on UXmas.com (a “digital advent calendar for user experience designers”). Ruth’s humorous yet expert observations are spot on, and provide a painless introduction to some of the usability and accessibility issues that Wiser Usability addresses. And, note the coincidental red-and-green colors of the […]
A Case Study of Three Travel Sites for the 50+ Traveler Dramatic aging of the global population. Ever-rising numbers of older adults online. Increasing sophistication of online apps. Growing public awareness of differently-abled individuals. Collectively, have these trends resulted in improved website design for older web users? To study this question, we conducted an independent […]
I was pleased to read in VIA Magazine that AAA has revamped one of their sites, seniordriving.aaa.com. The article said the revision would provide new content, including advice, tools, and even brain-fitness exercises. The site officially launched March 1, 2012, and I checked it out as soon as possible. First, let me say that I love […]
Both WCAG and Section 508 recommend the ability to resize text, but the following implementation probably wasn’t what they had in mind. The provisions of Section 508 apply to the Federal Government, of course, but it should come as no surprise that some agencies do better at implementing accessibility than others. Don’t take a page […]
Access Exchange International (AEI) is a non-governmental organization promoting accessible public transportation for persons with disabilities and seniors around the world. With support from a variety of sources including the World Bank, AEI has been extraordinarily successful at fostering both accessible design of pedestrian infrastructure and transport systems — consisting of everything from motorized rickshaws […]
The Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery recently awarded Prof. Alan Newell (School of Computing, University of Dundee, Scotland) its Social Impact Award for his decades of work on making information and communications technology more accessible to seniors. Prof. Newell presented an overview of his work at the ACM CHI […]
