According to Mike Bradley, senior lecturer in product design and engineering at Middlesex University, efforts to be more inclusive are being undermined by software and hardware design that is exclusively targeted at younger users.
We caught up with Bradley, who is working on projects to design simpler interfaces for older users.
Q. Is modern technology really any more exclusive than earlier generations for older people?
A.The older graphical user interfaces were, compared to today, a lot simpler. There was a lot less going on, the icons were simpler – with some designed to work in black and white, they tended to be more obvious.
Also, if you look at the number of icons on each package and compare, say, Microsoft Word today to the first incarnation of Word, there's about three times as many icons. If you're a novice, that's much more difficult to get your head around.
For people like us who have grown up with computers, the change has been easy, it's incremental. But the developments have skewed most mainstream software packages towards the expert user. If you're designing an application you get feedback from customers who say – “I'd like this feature or that feature” and they stick it in, evolving it towards the needs of their current customers.
It's good business practice, but the net effect is that packages get more complex. Unless there's a recognition and a reset they will get progressively more difficult for novices to master.
Q. Is there an argument for a tiered approach - one package with several interfaces?
A. It's been talked about in the research community, the idea of progressive disclosure, where you're not going to show the full functionality to people from the off, but you allow them to discover the basic and then move onto an intermediate level.
I've not seen a good implementation of that in software yet. The idea of looking after your user and understanding where they start from and allowing them to improve skills before you throw the big, heavy stuff at them is probably best shown in gaming.
Q. Do developers of technologies such as smartphones take too much knowledge for granted?
A. They certainly do. In our research, we've been getting older people to use things like the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. With both Apple and Android – they are much easier than trying to learn to use a PC, but you do get to a point where you have to understand iconography, and work quite laterally to complete tasks.
In out study groups, I've asked people to set an alarm and although they can find the alarm icon, they're faced with a screen with a clock face and a plus sign icon, and they couldn't understand that you were “adding an alarm,” so they didn't click the plus sign to get through to that menu. Pressing the clock image takes you through to choices about how the clock is displayed, and it's not easy to get back again.
So it's straight away skewed towards more competent people like us, because it requires an amount of experience to be able to navigate at the first attempt.
Q. With stripped down, basic technology for older people, isn't there a danger that we end up patronising them?
A. It's certainly a trap to fall into. We talk about older people in a general sense, but the reality is that there's a huge diversity in technical abilities among the older generations, much more so than with younger people. So you need to pin down what level of expertise we're talking about.
An iPhone for some older people is absolutely perfect because they have the ability, but for others it's completely wrong because they need something far more basic that just does the simple things.
To design one solution for that many users is extremely difficult, unless it is embedded in a touchscreen type device, where you can change the buttons and software and give people different displays depending on their level of ability. With a touchscreen device, you can customise it more easily than with hard key buttons.
Q. Could developers make more of touchscreens with better instructions and walk throughs?
A. That would help and the research we're doing will look at tools to help people. It can be useful, but one of the things we've learned is that for some older people, because with technology you need a different mindset, the process of learning certain things can be very difficult.
There's some research regarding older people trying to learn traditional computers and some of them were going back week after week and really making no significant progress, because they just weren't learning, but tutorials work for people with the ability to learn.
There's a space for a system that assumes nothing - no previous knowledge would be required to walk up and use the device without too much difficulty.
Q. Is there a danger of losing functionality with that?
A. There is a function and feature trade-off with usability and most computing professionals will recognise that. What terrifies the technology community is the idea that we're going to dumb down for people that don't understand it, but I'm not advocating that.
You need some devices that are appropriate for people that are not technically minded and, in many respects, that's a more difficult challenge than designing technology for technologists.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk