Website usability across age groups: Examining the effect of adaptive website design for changes in cognition associated with aging

Abstract

Websites, and the internet as a whole, are an ever-growing presence in modern life, from research to banking to online shopping and more. Despite their relevance to people of ages, many website designs do not consider the cognitive changes that occur as we age, making them difficult for many older adults to use. While website design principles and elements that support older adults have been developed through prior research, the impact of these designs on other people who use websites – i.e., younger adults – has not been explored. As such, the current study examined the impact adaptive design principles have on usability for older and younger adults. Using two websites about COVID-19 – one designed to be adaptive for older adults, and the other conventional – we had participants complete a series of questions about the content of the website, measuring their accuracy and response time. After completing the questions, participants completed a usability scale to measure how usable they found the website to be. Unfortunately, a low number of older adult participants meant that we could not draw meaningful conclusions about the impact of website design on older adults. Overall, as we hypothesized, we found that website design had a limited impact on younger adults, although we also found some interesting trends in usability for younger adults that may indicate towards interactions of website design, age, and usability measures that needs to be explored further.