UI consistency for an aging population
The rate of design innovation and app updates is so rapid nowadays that even we the Internet Generation can find it hard to keep up. We're also not getting any younger. Should we start preparing for our future selves by introducing UI standards for applications?
After moving countries many years ago I briefly lived in a flat originally reserved for pensioners. One day our 83-year-old neighbour rang our doorbell terribly frustrated because she couldn't work out how to use her telephone. She'd just got a new one and all the symbols on the buttons were different than her old one, and she didn't know which one started a call and which one would end it. My wife took a brief look at the phone, rushed back to our flat and returned with a sheet of small coloured circle stickers. She put a green one on the call button and a red one on the hang up button. Immediately with that small UI change our neighbour once again understood how use her phone and regained all the freedom it provided.
At the time I didn't think much of this exchange other than I was happy that my wife could help our neighbour. But earlier this year I witnessed something similar with my mum which reminded me of it. She was trying to look something up on her phone using an app, but she couldn't find the function she was looking for. "Every week there are updates," she complained, "and they always move things around!" This time the UI problem was more complicated than coloured stickers could solve.
I knew exactly what my mum meant though and part of my current job even involves rebuilding a web application, including re-housing certain modules and options. As part of a generation that grew up with the internet I am more used to the fluid nature of web UI and tend not to concretely remember where anything is located but just follow the usual conventions until I find what I'm looking for.
But I started to wonder if that would always be the case. As my generation gets older, I wondered, would we start to lose track of the currently accepted UI conventions? Especially as our cognitive abilities start to decline with age, would we too become lost in the ever-changing nature of app design? What new technologies will be invented in the next 30 or so years that will be as new and alien to us as our old neighbour's new phone was to her?
For me an ideal solution to this problem would be for app store owners to enforce UI guidelines in all apps, something akin to the Material design UI that a lot of open source apps use. If all apps were to conform to the same UI layout and conventions - hamburger menu in the top left corner, current page title at the top, a Settings menu identified by a cogwheel icon in the top right corner, etc - no one would be required to learn a new layout each time they download a new app and elderly users would always know where to look for what they need. I can hear all the marketers and designers gnashing their teeth at this idea from here.
Perhaps a more realistic solution would be for app developers to release two versions of their apps - the main one as it currently exists, with the newest and flashiest features, and a second one designed to be used by the elderly, people with physical or mental disabilities, or anyone who would just prefer a consistent app experience. This would of course then require supporting two apps instead of one and rolling out new features in two places.
Maybe there just isn't a good solution and this is all just a pipe dream of mine. The one thing I am sure of though is that we're running out of time to fix the problem before it's too late and we're already living it.