Ageing consumers and the UI balancing act

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of an Australian radio program Future Tense discussing the work towards and implications of increasing human lifespans (the episode is over a month old but I have a long podcast backlog). The program ends with an interview with Dr. Joe Coughlin, director of M.I.T.'s AgeLab. My ears perked up when he started talking about design:

Design is the language by which we speak to the customer. Now I'd love to give you a lecture that universal design, you know things that are easy to see, easy to read, and manipulate, is the answer for an ageing society.

It's certainly part of an answer, but universal design or simplicity for simplicity's sake, does not excite and delight the customer. You know the Baby Boomers have become the generation that they are because they've always demanded more, shiny and cool. Well universal design in general suggest that beige is a colour. I'm sorry, beige is not a colour.

As a Web application developer I hear the topic of accessibility come up every so often. In the discussions I've participated in, accessibility is usually thought of as designing for people with disabilities due to illness or an accident. With Web development being a relatively young industry, there are not many people working in it who are over 50 so few Web developers can relate to ageing-related accessibility at a personal level. However an ageing population means that the percentage of consumers who develop age-related usability issues will grow over time, and Web sites that can cater for that growing market will have a competitive advantage.

I'm not a User Interface person so I don't really know what I should be doing to make my Web interfaces more "ageing-friendly". As Dr. Coughlin points out, it's not simply a matter of making interfaces more "accessible". The Baby Boomers are sophisticated consumers that still expect to be excited and delighted even in accessible interfaces. Approaches such as "universal design" won't be enough to win them over.

All of this highlighted to me the many forces that designers need to be balanced when creating user interfaces. These forces are very different to those that need balancing when creating software (correctness, performance, security, and so on). I think my efforts would be better spent mastering the software development balancing act rather than add the user interface design balancing act to it. I do appreciate the work that goes into good user interface design: I just think it's not work I'm well suited for.

Source: Ageing futures - Future Tense - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):

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