Interface Design in a World of Aging
Background
Due to the pandemic, I had the opportunity to spend my junior fall in a go-local program in Beijing. When I was waiting for my Uber one day on the roadside, I encountered an older woman who was having troubles with the bike-sharing app on her phone and asked me for help. Though I was confident and willing to help, I ended up failing to solve the problem after ten minutes of struggling, which left me a bit embarrassed and confused.
Inspired by this experience, I started to think about problems in the design of existing technology and the challenges faced by senior users. As a result, I wrote this a paper in my EM52 Technical and Managerial Communication class in the following spring semester for more insights in this topic.
TOPIC PROPOSAL
Why do we care about senior users?
With rapid economical and technological development, the 21 century is progressing at a faster speed than ever. However, contrary to the burgeoning digital industries, the world population growth has slowed down significantly since past decades, bringing the problem of population aging into the spotlight.
Population ageing is known to be the severest for developed countries, which are also the ones with the fastest technological progress. This imbalance prompted me to think of the future, when our lives will highly rely on all kinds of high-tech products, while one in six people using these machines will be someone over 65 years old. This is definitely an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with.
From my perspective, the solution to this issue lies in the interface design. It is not exaggerating to say that a interface determines the overall usability of a system, for it is the only media that bridges the reality with virtual world. As an Engineering Psychology major, I am curious about existing interface design programs for senior users, in what ways are they different from general design, what and the future directions will be like. I feel excited for the research as it will offer new insights in this field of senior users that I have not paid attention to before. This topic is also highly relevant to each of us, since we all have elderly family members, and will ultimately become part of that senior group ourselves.