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 […]
Usability Posts
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 […]
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 […]
While gains in technology adoption are no doubt impressive and encouraging, it would be a huge mistake to assume that everybody is on the same technology curve. Think “technology natives” vs. “technology immigrants.” For instance, I help out in a class called “Intro to Macs” at a local senior center. The students all say they […]
The world already has web usability design guidelines. In fact, we have many, many different versions of sets of web design guidelines. While they don’t necessarily agree with each other on everything, there’s a general consensus on some major issues (e.g., don’t use white font on a yellow background; don’t cause displays to blink at […]
