How to Design New Age Apps for an Ageing Demographic?

People in the technology industry are quite oblivious of the fact that most of their apps will be used by people who are not young anymore. The age demography of users can be anywhere between 18 years to 65 years or more. Keeping the appeal of a mobile app intact without sacrificing usability is a challenge for all app development companies in Delhi, hence also for clients who commission the design of mobile apps. This is a key challenge for mobile app development companies as well as businesses that pay for the development process which must be overcome, primarily because a lot of us are ageing and the total population of aged users is increasing. So what have you been doing to make UX better and more practical for aged users?

Making screen objects more visible

With the progress of age, old people lose their ability to focus on objects there are small in size. You may have noticed an old person picking up newspapers, mobile phones, tablets close to their face to read it. The normal ageing process hardens human eye lenses making it really difficult to read text that are small. If your target demography cannot read what is on the screen, they will easily discard your app. To make screen objects more visible for the elderly, avoid using forms are smaller than 16 in size, do not use the colour blue, and consider offering on-screen text size adjustment sliders as well. Contrast ratios of text to the background is another area where you can work together with the app development companies and find what’s best for older users.

Keep audio – visual elements simple

Just as with eyesight, the listing power of seniors deteriorates with age. When you have to design an application with universal appeal, you’ll have to consider that seniors do not enjoy loud or funky beats coming out of their mobile phones. For one, it distracts them and secondly, it doesn’t make sense. If you can avoid audio elements in your application – great, however if audiovisual elements are an integral part of the overall experience, find out ways of making it subtle and easy on the seniors. Again, app development companies will be able to help you with that.

Don’t make things too hard

People over the age of 50 are already afraid of using technology. You may have noticed your ageing parents or someone in the neighborhood who is still using a 10 year old mobile phone just because they’re not comfortable using a touchscreen device. Migrating from a tactile user interface to touchscreen devices is already difficult for seniors; do not make it even more hard with small buttons, or easy to miss drop-down menus, or ridiculous color schemes.

Every single element on your mobile app must be smartly designed and should have a purpose. This is something that you’ll have to plan along with your app developers and fine tune until you have found the perfect UX. So, get cracking right now.