I watched a woman give up. She was trying to book a holiday and kept getting stuck in the same menu. By her fourth attempt, she said she would rather ring the company and ask for help. Then she closed the tab.
That clip was from a masterclass I did recently, called “How to design for an ageing population”, through the Interaction Design Foundation. It was full of real people, recorded during user testing, trying to use ordinary websites. Watching someone give up on a purchase because a website beat them is not comfortable to watch. It is exactly the kind of thing that should change how you build.
I did the course as part of keeping my own knowledge current, which I try to do every year. There was also a more specific reason this time. I am in early conversations with a few charities in North Yorkshire about looking after websites for organisations that support older people. Before taking that on, I wanted to check that what I already knew held up, and find the gaps.
Mostly, I already had it right. That is not me being smug. It is more that a lot of good practice for older users overlaps with good practice generally: clear layout, decent contrast, plenty of white space. But two things in the course changed how I will build sites from now on.
The first was watching someone try to use a dropdown menu with a submenu tucked off to the side. She had to move her cursor along a very narrow path to get from the main item to the one she actually wanted. Drift off that line by a few pixels and the whole menu disappears. She lost it five times trying to pick a country from a list.
I have built menus like that. Most web designers have. They feel completely natural when your hand control is quick and precise, which is most of us, most of the time. They get much harder to use if your hand shakes a little, or your reactions have slowed. That happens to nearly everyone eventually. I am rethinking how I handle menus with more than one level from here.
It is not just about bigger text
There is a habit of thinking that designing for older users means bigger fonts and calling it done. The course made a better case than that. One example compared two government websites. On one, making the text bigger meant scrolling to the bottom of the page, finding a link, and being sent off to browser settings. On the other, there was a single button on every page. Press it, and the text grew. Same goal, completely different experience.
The wider point stuck with me. Good design for older users tends to be good design for everyone. Bigger click targets, so you do not need to hit an exact pixel. Flexible fields, so a phone number is accepted however you type it. Fewer steps, less to remember. None of that makes a site worse for a younger visitor. It just removes the parts that were badly built in the first place.
Why this matters if you run a charity website
If your charity supports older people, your website is very likely one of the harder digital experiences some of your users deal with that day. Not because they are not capable, but because most websites are not built with them in mind. A form that is fiddly to fill in, or a menu that vanishes if you are not precise with a mouse, is not a small hassle. For some people, it is the reason they give up and never make contact.
None of this needs a full redesign to fix. A lot of it comes down to small, specific changes: bigger click areas, simpler menus, fewer steps in a form. That is the sort of detail I am paying closer attention to now, and it is exactly what I want to bring to any charity work I take on.
If you look after a website for a charity in North Yorkshire and you are wondering whether it would hold up to this kind of scrutiny, I am always happy to have that conversation.
