Towards an Up to Date list of Design Guidelines for Elderly Users

The number of elderly people is projected to increase notably around the globe in the coming decades. At the same time, the speed of technology adoption by elderly is moving slowly, while technology around both web platforms and touchscreens is evolving fast and gaining in popularity quickly. Being able to use these technologies is important to prevent elderly people from missing out on certain parts of society. Design guidelines play an important role in this. However, it is important to ensure that these guidelines are up to date, as what might have been and important guideline yesterday can be redundant today or needs an update. Also guidelines dealing with specific issues of these new technologies might be missing. To come to an up to date list of design guidelines for elderly users, we collected existing, both web and touchscreen device guidelines; merged them together into a combined list of checks & guidelines, and performed an expert evaluation to investigate their relevance for the development of web and touchscreen based applications, with a special focus on the needs of elderly users. In this paper, We discus how we compile the list of guidelines and present the results of the expert evaluation. We also discussed the results and point to future work needed in this context.