Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design

by Jeff Johnson, Kate Finn

Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Towards Universal Design presents age-friendly design guidelines that are well-established, agreed-upon, research-based, actionable, and applicable across a variety of modern technology platforms. The book offers guidance for product engineers, designers, or students who want to produce technological products and online services that can be easily and successfully used by older adults and other populations. It presents typical age-related characteristics, addressing vision and visual design, hand-eye coordination and ergonomics, hearing and sound, speech and comprehension, navigation, focus, cognition, attention, learning, memory, content and writing, attitude and affect, and general accessibility. The authors explore characteristics of aging via realistic personas which demonstrate the impact of design decisions on actual users over age 55.

258 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2017

Reviews

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple practical advice and guidelines on designing user interfaces for older people, backed up by personas and data about older people. Gives information on a range of capabilities and other aspects that are affected by age, and discusses how these could be addressed in UI design. There is also a chapter on how to work with older adults as part of the design process, and there are some case studies. The book is illustrated with photos, UI examples and "quotes" and anecdotes from the personas throughout, and is clearly structured. The guidelines are clear and simple, but there are so many of them that it is slightly overwhelming. Nevertheless this is one of the best summaries of this topic that I have seen and the personas are really helpful (though it should be noted that they all use computers to some entext - there are no "digitally excluded" older people in the set).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think a lot of the information presented in this book should be self-evident/common sense. For example, don't use colors which blend in with the background, don't set very short time limits for completing actions (i.e. a dialog box which disappears in 3 seconds), test your system on a variety of users. However, the book is well written and could be good as a checklist if you wanted to verify that you thought of the different ways to make your system accessible to older users and people with disabilities.