Heuristics are one in a series of tactics that designers use to identify potential usability issues in products. Up to this point, existing heuristics geared towards older adults often seemed to be focused on people's disabilities rather than on people's abilities. Not everyone over 50 has eyesight poor enough to require maximizing the size or contrast of text of a web page. Not every person over 50 has problems with motor control or significant short term memory loss.
This research presented in Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: Expert Review of Usability for Older Adults at 50 Web Sites (PDF, 1.7M) takes those dimensions of the older user into account. In it, researchers Ginny Redish and Dana Chisnell apply this model to 50 web sites that are likely to be used by an older adult in the normal course of their day, from news sites to financial sites to health care and hobbies.
The primary finding is that the World Wide Web is not an inherently hostile place for older adults, though there are some ways that sites could do better to increase their usability for everyone.
Download the full report (PDF, 1.7M).
Related Research
Readers interested in the 50 Sites research may also find the accompanying literature review helpful. We also have made the resulting heuristics for designing web sites for older adults available as a separate HTML document.