Increasing Usability of the Ozaukee County Aging and Disability Resource Center Website

The Big Why

My experience as an occupational therapist for over two decades has highlighted the rapid growth of senior technology use for work, communication, daily needs, healthcare, and social interactions. This experience has also revealed some very real frustrations with technology in segments of the aging population that result in decreased use and abandonment, as well as self-blame for unsuccessful experiences. This project grew from a strong desire to define, assess, and improve the experience of seniors with technology.

Assumption that the aging population faces greater challenges with websites

Defining the Problem

Using some long-established knowledge of some of the issues the aging population and first hand experience with helping to facilitate clients through some of these challenges. I set out to explore and validate user concerns with a representative target audience of age 55 and above.

Competitive research screens for senior usability

Competitive analysis revealed that other municipal websites faced similar challenges of attempting to organize and display overwhelming amounts of resources and information

Percentages of user preferences preferring links, buttons and dropdowns

Revealing User Interviews

Direct quotes from participants in the interview process, placed eye-opening perspective on existing information architecture and set aspirations for future design goals.

User Interviews revealed that some aging individuals tended to blame themselves for difficulties with site navigation and that large blocks of text requiring extensive scrolling and excessive reading does not make navigation any easier.

Incorporating Research Results

The information gained from both the qualitative attitudes and behaviors as well as the quantitative data from surveys provided the insight needed for development of a user persona as well as a personal user journey to engender both empathy and understanding of representative users.

Rethinking the Information

Brainstorming possible design solutions and organizing them via affinity diagram fostered a solid directional path for design considerations

Barriers:

1. The lack of complex integration with form data, opting for contact phone numbers for additional information and sign ups.

2. Heavy use of PDFs for destination documents in some areas, resulting in significant scrolling which was one of our users’ indicated pain points.

Both of these items were outside of the current project scope, but can provide meaningful, future dialog on greater integration of digital resources.

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Next Step: Determining Our North Star

With the primary concerns being on good visual and organizational hierarchy, environmental simplification with logical placement, stronger visibility and accessibility, three strong problem statements emerged resulting in a "How Might We" statement that will the guiding statement for future design iteration.

How might we consider the physical and cognitive needs of aging individuals when redesigning websites to create more visually clear, logical, and organized flow of information to increase user confidence and success?