By Jon Carlo Stubblefield,Medical Guardian Interactive Web Developer
One of my daily tasks at Medical Guardian is developing websites that will create the best user experience for our primary clientele: senior citizens. Keeping in mind that seniors have different user needs than audiences in a younger demographic, it is necessary to design a user experience for them that will be tailored to their lifestyle. It’s important to consider your target audience at every stage of the process, and there are several practices I follow to ensure our seniors have the best user-experience possible.
Make the Audience Your Main Focus When designing or building a website, you have to keep in mind that you are not building this website for yourself. You are building it for an audience that will have specific requirements, so you may not be able to follow the same practices as other websites geared towards a younger crowd. Seniors need to see features such as larger font-sizes, brighter color schemes, and larger images in order to fully engage with your site and understand your message. By staying focused on the needs of your audience, you will be able to create an experience that your users will enjoy, and one that will encourage them to return to your website in the future.
Your Goals and Your Audience’s Goals Overlap You want to sell a product. Your Audience wants to buy a product. Therefore, you both have goals that overlap and the website you build for your audience should reflect that. The site should allow you to easily provide a service to your target market and it should help your target market find what they are looking for or see what you have to offer them. Making your site easy to navigate will increase your sales and keep people coming back for your services.
Keep It Simple There is one practice that always helps produce the best user experience:KEEP THE WEBSITE SIMPLE. If you are trying to market a product or service with your website, and chances are, if the client has found your website, they must have some interest in buying what you are offering. The worst thing that could happen at this point is that you miss out on a potential opportunity because your visitors could not locate the products page on your website or did not understand how to make a purchase or get in contact with you. Usability is Key. Some things to consider when evaluating the usability of your website:
- Is your navigation easy to find, read, and use?
- Do the colors on your website have enough contrast to be easily distinguished?
- Is the font-size on your website large enough to be read by all audiences comfortably?
- Does your website establish a clear path for the visitor to take after they have arrived?
- Do you have too much information on the same page to the point of overwhelming the visitor?
- Can your users understand the message you are trying to communicate to them?
When answering these questions, keep in mind that just because you understand your message or you can easily distinguish the colors on your site, does not mean that your audience will be able to do the same. You may need to test your site on your audience, get feedback from them and make adjustments as necessary.
With Baby Boomers turning 65 at a rate of 8,500 every day, it’s clear to see that a larger percentage of the population will have unique needs when it comes to web development in the coming years. If you keep in mind the three simple points outlined above, you’ll be guaranteed to have a better user-experience for your customer, and thus, more sales.
Jon Carlo attended LaSalle University, having graduated in 2009 with duel degree—a Bachelor of Arts in Digital Art and Multimedia Design and a Bachelor of Science in Business Marketing. Jon Carlo went on to work as a web designer and developer for Yellowbook before coming over to Medical Guardian as their Interactive Web Developer.
