Design and Development of Middle Aged and Elderly Mobile E-commerce Apps and Sites

According to a survey conducted by Nielson Norman Group, user inter-generational changes, the ability of users between 25 and 60 to use web pages/APPs has "decreased by 0.8% year by year", and the use efficiency of middle-aged and elderly users can even be 74% lower than that of ordinary users. Because middle-aged and elderly users need to spend more time reading text, recognizing colors and modules, extracting information and understanding content. In this article, we focus on the design and development principles of "middle-aged and elderly mobile e-commerce".

Adults also need products like photo cakes, fondant cakes and diapers. We cannot neglect elderly as substantial consumers of the ecommerce sites or market.

These days they do online shopping and also use things what youngsters do, and may be more. So there is need to capatalize on the opportunity and enable them with better facilities so that they also may be customers of products like adult diapers, photo and fondant cakes, and so on.

Table of Contents

1. Inter-generational challenges faced by silver hair users

2. Design guidelines for silver power companies

3. Humanities guidelines for silver power companies

4. Universality of silver power companies: also suitable for young e-commerce development

Intergenerational challenges faced by silver hair users

As an aboriginal in the digital age, you may confidently think that "No matter how old I am, I will still be a waver in the digital age", but the cruel reality is that you have to compromise with the declining body functions as you age.

Vision

With age, the cornea of middle-aged and elderly users gradually loses luster, the lens becomes cloudy and yellow, and the retinal cells responsible for color recognition lose sensitivity.

Middle-aged and elderly people have greatly reduced their perception and sensitivity to light, color, and fonts. The visual interaction between middle-aged and elderly users and the product is troublesome.

UI vision for the elderly

Most middle-aged and elderly people will experience a decline in muscle motor control and hand-eye coordination. Hand tremor, arthritis and other diseases can hinder fine screen interaction, making movement slow and inconsistent. And after hearing loss, at the same level, elderly users need a volume of 40 decibels to receive content that can be obtained by young users at 4 decibels.

Memory and Understanding

Middle-aged and elderly users have a decline in short-term memory, difficulty concentrating, and easy distraction. It makes it difficult for them to follow the navigation to complete the task accurately, or handle multi-step tasks.

1. Online shopping for the elderly
2. Design guidelines for silver power companies
3. Enhance color contrast

The degeneration of the vision system causes the perception deviation of middle-aged and elderly people far beyond the imagination of young people, and enhancing image contrast is the "sweet magic weapon" for improving the visual experience of middle-aged and elderly users.

"Red, Yellow and Green" in the eyes of young people vs. "Red, Yellow and Green" in the eyes of the elderly

So what kind of color is suitable for middle-aged and elderly people? We recommend that while keeping the brand color as much as possible, follow the following WCAG design standards:

Ordinary user: 3:1 contrast ratio is the minimum recommended text and visual level visible to the naked eye.

Middle-aged and elderly users: Vision is hindered, and the acceptable contrast ratio should rise to 4.5:1 to 7:1.

With the following figure, you can explore the impact of different contrasts on the visual perception of middle-aged and elderly users:

Color contrast design for middle-aged and elderly e-commerce

In addition, we also need to ensure that middle-aged and elderly users can still clearly distinguish colors under grayscale conditions. Remember, we need to minimize the use of blue.

The visual system of middle-aged and elderly people is easy to selectively absorb blue light, which leads to a lower level of discrimination of blue light than red and green light.

Enhance the power of text and font size

In mobile phone screens, 11px-12px font sizes are often used in designs, which can cause reading problems for some young people with poor eyesight, let alone middle-aged and elderly people.

For middle-aged and elderly people, experts recommends increasing the font size by at least about 50%, that is, starting from 16px.

Middle-aged and elderly e-commerce font size design

In addition, thin and sans-serif fonts are not friendly to middle-aged and elderly users. We should avoid rendering important content with such fonts.

Secondly, it is not recommended to put text in pictures. Due to the weakening of the elderly's perception of color, it will lead to "the blending of pictures and text", which increases the burden on the eyes and affects reading.

Different from young users, middle-aged and old people have lower understanding, acceptance and trust in things than young users, but they have the habit of reading more carefully and patiently.

Therefore, in the process of designing copywriting guidance, we need to add more detailed text descriptions to establish more specific content perception and trust for middle-aged and elderly people.

For example, add more text descriptions to the user registration journey to explain the steps and provide detailed guidance.

Middle-aged and elderly e-commerce registration process design

Add a more detailed text description in the registration process to guide correct registration.

Minimalist Gesture Interaction

Accompanied by the imbalance of hand muscle sensitivity and the decline of short-term memory, middle-aged and elderly users lose the precision and speed required to control the attention process when they are young, and are unable to handle complex interactive gestures and interface processes.

In terms of interactive gestures, the complex is simplified, allowing middle-aged and elderly users to "only rely on one click" to complete. The size of the buttons is also quite particular.

Generally speaking, buttons with a size of 44pixel * 44 pixel or larger can provide users with a more comfortable clicking experience on any screen.

Middle-aged and Elderly e-commerce Button Interface Design

Simple product and operation navigation can reduce the learning cost of middle-aged and elderly users, and also help middle-aged and elderly users to enhance their confidence in learning, and form operational muscle memory and conditioning.

We need to condense all information into one screen as much as possible, because middle-aged and elderly users will have difficulty sliding their fingers up and down, and split-screen operations (or using multiple pages to handle one thing) will make it difficult for users to concentrate.

For example, we need to condense the checkout process into one screen and reduce the checkout span to form a "memory map" for paying the bill.

Generally, we can start from the following 9 principles:

Establish a simple, clear, and coherent navigation system that repeats the same conventions and sequences as much as possible.

The navigation system should be as "flat" as possible and avoid hiding content deep in the system.

The design of the screen should help to quickly scan the core content and quickly navigate to the relevant location.

The user's current location should be very clear, as should the way to return to the original location.

The topic title should be clearly visible and consistent in content.

Use a simple normal background to avoid distraction.

Using experimental and innovative UI elements may confuse users, try to avoid this.

Give visual feedback on completion progress and situation.

Prompt sounds can be used for auxiliary instructions, such as prompt sounds for successful payment and successful delivery.

Middle-aged and elderly e-commerce navigation and settlement design

There is need of streamlined middle-aged and elderly e-commerce navigation and settlement interface.

Although cognitive decline does add barriers for middle-aged and elderly users to master digital skills, it does not mean that learning is ineffective.

If middle-aged and elderly people get thoughtful design support, they can also be proficient in operating mobile e-commerce.

Humanities guidelines for development companies

In terms of design, the elderly in the future riding the digital wave will have various levels of experience, but our definition principle is still "suitable for beginners."

Excellent design will bring confidence to middle-aged and elderly users and make them feel humanistic care and tolerance in the experience process.

Elderly users should be able to enjoy mobile e-commerce surfing

We need to prevent "middle-aged and elderly users questioning their abilities", and preventing errors is the main goal of the design process. "Clear and clear" is more effective than "beautiful."

Design elements should not only serve as decorations, each should have a practical function.

Universality of silver power companies: also suitable for young e-commerce development

The digital explosion era has given birth to a large number of youth digitally fatigued people.

They have mastered digital skills and are physically healthy, but high-intensity digital bombardment has been difficult to mobilize their enthusiasm for interaction.

Digital fatigue crowd VS silver-haired crowd, we can find the following phenomena:

• Don't want to see VS can't see clearly

• Too lazy to slip VS not to slip

• Don't want to learn VS difficult to learn

How does the design concept of silver power companies apply to digitally fatigued people?

This can be applicable:

By adjusting the size and proportion of text, buttons, pictures, etc., focus on key points, helping users quickly grasp the key points.

Visual fatigue caused by collision of soft colors through color matching.

Simple and easy to understand product experience and navigation.

Avoiding rich gesture interaction etc.

Conclusion

In the view of the need of the elderly to use ecommerce which is the need of the hour such development in mobile e-commerce is called forth. Elderly also need to enjoy online buying when they need products that are sold online which may be from wedding cakes to adult diapers. But as the elderly need more easy interface on the online selling platforms this must be made available. As the number of elderly is very large all over the world it is a high revenue market, and an opportunity to tap.