Tom Tullis: Making It Easy For Seniors (and Everyone Else)
Tom Tullis runs Fidelity Investments' Center for Applied Technology. He was the keynote speaker at the Philadelphia World Usability Day 2005, where he gave a talk on "Usability and the Evolution of Technology, or You Shouldn't Have to Read a User Manual to Ride an Elevator!" We asked him what he's working these days. He wrote to say:
"One of the things I'm passionate about right now is making websites easier for older adults to use. We've learned quite a few things over the past few years from the usability testing we've done with older adults about how to improve websites for them. Interestingly, most of these improvements tend to help everyone, not just older adults."
"Some of the things we've learned have not been particularly obvious, such as the "cautious clicking" behavior we've seen with so many older adults: the tendency to put their mouse over a link and then debate about whether or not that's the right link to click on. We've discovered several techniques that help alleviate this and improve their ability to get things done with the website.
"One of the things that helped address the "cautious clicking" behavior was a much clearer wording of the links, and, in particular, adding "action words" to the links. For example, instead of a link saying "Accounts", having it say "Go to Accounts" or "View Accounts". That made a big difference. Interestingly, it made a big difference for everyone, regardless of age.
"Another thing that we've just finished testing is the ability to turn on an option that gives you a more elaborate "tooltip" if you pause briefly with your mouse on a link-- something like a one- or two-sentence pop-up description of what that link will do. We found that older adults really read these pop-ups. And it significantly improved their ability to get their tasks done."
"Surprisingly, the pop-ups did not add to the time that they took to do the tasks-- they spent less time reading the pop-up descriptions than they did pondering what the link was for when there was not a pop-up. Interestingly, this feature was neutral for younger people: it didn't hurt or significantly help their performance with the site."
World Usability Day 2007 is sponsored by:
