Testing considerations

Do you know an elderly person who owns a smartphone? If you do, you know how frustrating these and many other technology-driven devices can be to the elderly. Most of the well-known tech companies are proud of their large investments in user research and usability testing facilities. And yet, the difficulty the elderly have with operating devices raises a concern about the true ease of use of their products.

This ties to the topic of this segment--test participants map to user personas. As was described earlier in the book, personas are used early on in the design process, as models of key user-segments. Obviously, with products such as smartphones which have hundreds of millions of users of all ages worldwide, personas can be very limited.

So, if an elderly persona has not been created, it is quite likely that little or no testing will be performed with this segment of the user market. Given the difficulties elderly people have with technology, the industry's claim...