Week 6 – Designing for seniors

As our client wanted us to focus on designing for senior citizens (ages 50+), we spent time researching how this would affect our design. Looking into all of this, it was pretty clear that most senior citizens shy away from using computers and smart devices not because they are old fashioned as a lot of people assume, but because the user interface wasn’t designed with their needs in mind.

The main challenges we found deal with vision and hearing impairments. As one gets older, these two senses tend to form various problems and are the ones which our target audience encounters the most.

Common vision impairments experienced by senior citizens include:

1. A decreased ability to focus and refocus
2. A  lower sensitivity to light and changes to light
3. A decreased ability to detect contrasts such as the difference between blue and green
4. Various medical conditions such as Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy

Common hearing impairments experienced by senior citizens include:

1. A decreased ability to detect higher pitches; especially female voices
2. A decreased ability to detect quiet, whisper like volumes
3. A decreased ability to detect speech against background noise
4. A decreased ability to hear reasonably loud sounds

We also found a couple of challenges that hadn’t come to mind when designing UI. For instance, many senior citizens have various motor impairments which would cause difficulty navigating smart devices and computers. Small assets and buttons placed close to each other cause many instances of accidentally clicking on the wrong thing. Seeing as our client intends to run this app primarily on smart tablets, space economy is going to be a valuable and important thing to consider. Other senior citizens may only know English as a second language and/or have low literacy skills which would make it especially difficult to learn all the information we want them to.

The biggest challenge though isn’t physical but mental. Unfortunately many senior citizens have had frustrating and sometimes embarrassing experiences in the past using computers and smart technology; again, due to poor UI design that did not address their needs. They are hesitant to go back in again and may even have the fear of “breaking” something. Whatever we design needs to be appealing and clear from the beginning that our target audience won’t have problems navigating through it.

So what can Code Blue do?

Our research gave us a good idea of where to start and what could we reasonably do in a semester long period.

We decided to focus primarily on visionary and motor problems as these were most relevant to us and where the most common UI complaints that senior citizens came from: small text, bright backgrounds, no universal design, buttons not large enough, too many animated graphics, etc. The good news is that these can be reasonably tackled within our time frame by making smart design choices and leveraging custom options computers have to change settings such as brightness.

While we were also thinking of taking care of the sound design as well, it was agreed that this would be primarily left to whoever would be in charge of creating video content (what we have now was provided to us by our client).

As for seniors with more severe sensory impairments, low literacy rates, and/or doesn’t know English well, it was brought to our attention that in those instances a caregiver would be helping the patient navigate through the app. To take on the design challenges that would address these problems would certainly be innovative but would require a lot more time than we currently have.

So where’s the innovation?

After compiling our research and going over it, it was decided upon that the innovation in our project would not come from UI design. Trying to do so would waste valuable time in design and production; giving seniors who prefer familiarity a never before seen, flashy UI over a straightforward, no gimmicks UI could backfire. The innovation we found instead would come from the fact that we’re incorporating patients’ personal info (name, prognosis, etc.) so that aid is tailored to their needs, which has never been done before.