Tips on Designing for Mature (Elderly) Audiences

[Carrot]

I'm working on a website design whose primary targets will be baby boomers and those in their latter years. I am by no means a professional web designer, and have offered to help because I enjoy coding (HTML & CSS), and I enjoy researching usability and learning new and better ways to build a site.

That said, I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on designing for people in this age range. The site I'm working on is primarily informational, and offers frequently updated news about events in the community while also providing information about programs and services offered by the organization itself.

As far as design tips go, here's what I've been thinking of so far, based on research and brainstorming:

Scalable font sizes (em)
Alt text EVERYTHING, for keyboards and screen readers.
Liquid Layout (I'm assuming that not everyone in my target age range will have a 1024x768, so I don't want to pin my design to that resolution)
Large buttons
High contrast
Nothing fancy. No drop down menus, scrolling text, etc.
Little scrolling of the site itself. Clearly indicate if its required, but I'm not sure how.

One problem is that there are links on the current homepage that could be lumped under one category, but I'm not sure of the best way to do that without adding to user navigation time and without using drop-downs.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[suz]

Is there a reason for the no drop down menu?

 

[Carrot]

I had wanted to use a drop-down menu originally, but after reading about it for a bit it seemed that the general consensus was that they weren't the best solution as far usability was concerned. Older folks may have trouble clicking the right link of the offered choices, or they may twitch their mouses in a way that makes the menu disappear before they choose what they want.

A potential solution to this could be a click-and-stay drop down menu, similar to the click-and-stay image galleries I've seen at CSSPlay. (IE, click thumbnail and larger image loads off to the side.)

Still, I've been reading so many negative thoughts on drop-downs that I'm leery of using one.

 

[bullzeyedesign]

That's definitely a difficult audience to design for. You are on the right track though - make the font big, and give them an option to increase it or decrease it. Anything to make things simpler without much scrolling will help.

Perhaps you can try an expanding navigation instead of drop downs. Just show the main categories in the left nav, and as they drill down into a section the other categories will appear. For example, if it was a clothing store, you would have categories such as shop by brand, pants, shirts, and hats. If they clicked on "shirts" the nav would expand to show short sleeve, collared, long sleeve, t-shirts, and so on.

Hope that helps!