Mobile apps usability issues for seniors

The population growth rate keeps getting lower and lower year by year in most countries. As an obvious result, the world’s population is getting older as more years pass. It’s estimated that by 2050 a quarter of each country’s population will consist of people over 60. This rapid aging process in all countries (except Africa) has become the main concern for most governments.

Since seniors are at more risk for illnesses and need particular care and consideration, governments can prepare sufficient infrastructures for seniors as soon as possible. They first need to improve the health care system and raise the capacity to receive more loads of patients in the near future. They also need to consider ways to make life more straightforward for seniors. Here is where the technology, especially mobile applications, will find so handy.

Hundreds of mobile applications are exclusively designed and developed for seniors and their needs. But are they all efficient? No! And we have this article to prove it.

Why Is It Important to Detect Apps Usability Issues?

Developing apps for special groups of society, like seniors, kids, and people with specific disabilities, is a pretty new phenomenon in the market! That’s why the experts should conduct many trials and studies to achieve the best outcome in this field.

Developing mobile apps for seniors is way different from designing generic ones. Before taking any action, we need to look for the current mobile app features and find how they can be challenging for seniors.

It takes more time for seniors to get familiar with mobile apps and use them compared to younger generations. Most seniors have certain limitations that app development companies must keep an eye on when developing apps for this group. If we want to talk about the issues that most current mobile apps have for seniors use, we have to categorize them into three main parts:

• Visual
• Psychomotor
• Cognitive issues

The aim of designing and developing these apps is to raise the quality of seniors’ life. So designers and mobile app companies should be aware of seniors’ common usability challenges and try their best to design the most efficient apps to answer seniors’ needs and requests.

Visual Issues:

As you can get from its name, this part refers to the improper design of a mobile application’s visual elements, including characters, fonts, icons, images, buttons, charts, and their colour, size, and fonts.

What we largely see in most apps, even some of the ones exclusively developed for seniors, is the inappropriate use of colours, small-sized fonts, and poor contrast and sharpness.

Psychomotor Problems:

Paying attention to the visual elements is merely a starting point. Developers should consider the fact that most seniors have a limited range of motion, and the coordination between their nerves and muscles is slower. Senior users find the apps that demand complex, fast or repetitive actions like swiping, double tapping or long-press and hold inconvenient and confusing.

Cognitive Challenges:

Any irrelevant graphics and non-meaningful icons, decorations, animations, and non-labelled icons and symbols cause senior users to get lost and confused while using the app.

Designers should consider the essential guidelines for developing apps for seniors to make the experience more pleasant for their target audience.

Samples of Senior-Friendly Mobile Applications

Living Maples, a company that exclusively offers products to seniors, has tried its best to design and develop apps for senior needs in the most user-friendly and convenient form. Want to check them out? Keep reading!

Witty Words

Seniors who enjoy crossword puzzles can exercise their memory, expand their vocabulary, and learn new words. Most letters and their positions in Witty Words are easy to remember. Playing Witty Words is perfect for training the brain and memory since it allows users to reinforce their memory.

As you can observe, the Witty Words game is made with big buttons and enough contrast so that older people with visual impairments can use it more easily.

Silvers Videos

YouTube is a perfect source to find related videos about the subject you’re searching for, but it throws you into a huge pool of videos, which can be confusing for seniors. Also, they may find the size of the fonts or the subscribing and commenting processes complicated, especially those with cognitive issues.

The silvers videos app has categorized videos and written down a summary for each to avoid confusion and cognitive challenges and help users who have trouble finding what they need. Thanks to its user-friendly design, big buttons, and touch zone, older adults will have a great user experience using this app.

Silvers Pill Reminder & Medication Tracker

Silvers Pill Reminder is exclusively designed and developed for senior users, with a user-friendly and straightforward environment. It’s great for people with memory issues because it allows you to take a picture of your medications and set up reminders for every one of them.

Seniors with vision troubles may not be able to read the tiny descriptions on pill packages or distinguish one pill from another, leading to the overuse of potentially harmful medications. This medicine tracker for seniors can also take images of your medications, drops, or solutions with legible letters. The alarm will remind you to take your meds by displaying their photos!

Final Words

Developing senior-friendly applications demands much more effort, observation, and study. As we mentioned before, to create perfect features and develop an app with the least complexity and challenge for seniors, you need to detect the current issues in the existing mobile apps of the markets and then try to offer the best solutions.

Which app do you think is the best for senior users? Why? Let us know in the comments section.