This week we reached the end of our first project our smartwatch app with a critique and were given the brief for our second, a UI for on-board an autonomous vehicle.
The critique as usual was an opportunity to get my lecturer and classmates to look at my designs and for me to get feedback which I could then use to improve the design before the hand-in in January. I received some very useful feedback which I have taken on-board and will be using to improve my designs.
The brief for our second project is a very interesting one as autonomous vehicles are a very recent technology and only really in any form of use in the USA, and even there they are constantly under review and testing, as a quick Google search for Cruise will show. So the UI we will be designing will be for a vehicle that in reality does not exist yet, this offers both a challenge and an opportunity, a challenge in that there will be very little in the way of competitors to look at but an opportunity to look at some blue-sky thinking and based on a blog post I read by Jordan Moore working backwards from magic. I am looking forward to this project.
As I was designing my smartwatch app as a fall detection app with a target audience in the older age demographic, I did quite a lot of research surrounding the best practices for designing for older people and their preferences and I wanted to summarise my research in this blog post.
Age can affect people in many ways, physically and cognitively and this affects how they interact with the world, people and objects. Add to this the increase in the use of touchscreen devices of all different sizes over the last 10-20 years and you can see that when looking at designing a product designed for older people there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to make the user experience of that product work for the target audience.
I started by looking online for some basic guidelines to design for older people and found this guide on interface design for older adults: *https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/ui-design-for-older-adults.*
Firstly, this guide looked at visual considerations that may need to be made to help older people use a design. The first guideline was pretty obvious as eyesight deteriorates with age, older people tend to prefer larger font sizes for text, and larger buttons as well so increasing the font and button size is a good first move to help older adults use your product. Other considerations this guide suggests are to label all icons to help users who are perhaps less comfortable with technology and therefore less likely to have lots of experience of the industry standard icons and what they do to know what each icon does. This is really a no-brainer as it helps those who are less confident use the product with ease while not affecting the user experience for more confident users. Something I didn’t know prior to reading this guide was how over time our eye’s become less sensitive to different shades of blue, therefore extra care needs to be taken when using blue within our designs and a general move towards high contrast across the colour spectrum will help all users.
It turns out this is due to a physical change in the lenses of our eyes which yellow with age cutting out light from the blue end of the colour spectrum.
“It's well known that our colour vision declines with age. Gradual yellowing of the lenses cuts out light in the blue range of the spectrum, while colour-sensing cone receptors on our retinas slowly lose sensitivity.”
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/05/09/3755240.htm (Last Accessed 27/12/23)
So what colours are a better choice for older people, well one article I found suggests that warm reds and golds are easier to see compared to blue or green. Therefore, using colours from the red end of the colour spectrum would seem to be a good choice for an older audience. (Source: https://www.directsupply.com/blog/color-trends-for-senior-living Last Accessed 27/12/23)
The guide now moves on to looking at best practices for the interactions in a design for older adults. In this case it is declining motor skills that are the issue and like with the visual considerations above an easy way to help with this is to increase the size of areas that a user needs to interact with, such as buttons. While many design systems offer advised sizes for interactive components in the case of designing for older people these should be viewed as a bare minimum and increased in size if possible. It is also worth noting that older users may not be as familiar with common interactions used on touchscreens such as pinch to zoom for example. Therefore, keeping interactions simple and preferably achievable with just one finger is good practice. Much like icons requiring labels it is important to provide visual cues to make where you can touch to interact clear for users.
Source: https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/ui-design-for-older-adults (Last Accessed 27/12/23)
I found this quote from the abstract of a study comparing middle-aged and older adults using touchscreens:
Convenience samples of two age groups were considered, one including 28 independent community-living older adults aged 81.9 ± 4.2 years with intact or corrected vision and with the abilities to walk independently with or without a walking aid and to understand and follow simple commands, and the other including 25 healthy middle-age adults aged 53.4 ± 5.9 years. The usability assessment was conducted during a single session using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Older adults demonstrated poorer touchscreen skills compared to middle-aged adults. Previous experience in manipulating a smartphone by the older adults did not affect their performance.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7924826/ (Last Accessed 27/12/23)
I find of note the fact that previous experience of using a smartphone did not help older adults in this study, showing how this is very much a physical issue that cannot be worked around with time using a device. This means that we must design our products to be easier to manipulate foe older people.