Written on April 13th, 2010 by tasha
Check out the new Medicare website. It is very senior-friendly.
What a relief! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just unveiled the new www.medicare.gov. Most websites are constructed by “Net natives,” young designers who never have known a world without the Internet. They are not aware of the components required to make a website inviting for persons with little Internet experience, never mind those with visual impairments and arthritic hands!
CMS’ new website is head and shoulders above the previous incarnation in terms of usability. Based on feedback from seniors and family caregivers, site improvements I observe include:
- More white space and less clutter
- Larger text
- Large buttons
- More graphics
- Less scrolling
As a rule, seniors have difficulty pointing and clicking accurately. Large text and buttons, with plenty of white space between, reduces the likelihood of error and helps stiffer hands to click “on target” even if the mouse moves some in the process.
Of course, larger text (minimum of 12 pt type) and the ability to increase text size are required for senior-oriented sites. But there are other components to bear in mind as well. Here are some I see Medicare observing, and suggest you do as well:
- Keep all of the navigation “above the fold”. Scrolling is not intuitive. Keep all of the navigation above the bottom of a minimum size monitor. Many seniors do not understand, or have the ability, to click and drag on the scroll bar to the side.
- Avoid pull down menus. Pull down menus are not easy for seniors. Even if the viewer understands that a menu can open up to other options, the coordination required to click and drag can be challenging for older adults. (Remember the fashion of stair-stepping menus a few years back? One level led to the next and then the next. That was terrible for everyone, but especially for seniors!) On the new Medicare site, I am pleased to see that the top horizontal navigation displays the pages beneath simply by rolling over the titles. No fuss, no muss.
- Search should be clearly marked inside the box. The distinction between the search box and the address box is not evident to many who are new to the Internet. This new Medicare site puts search front and center. It also includes a label inside the search box, telling viewers this is where to enter their search queries.
- Links must be made obvious. Navigation made to look like buttons helps to signal novice web users that this is an element to click. And while link styles vary in contemporary web design, blue, underlined words in text are still the best way to indicate “this is a link” if your audience includes seniors. Underlining also helps with screen readers (special software for the visually impaired that gives audio cues that an element is a link.) CMS is fairly consistent with these two conventions. Bravo!
- No plug-ins are needed to operate the page. If I were to design a site for teens, I would be foolish not to include animations, flash movies, and all the latest bells and whistles. For seniors, however, these are distracting and intimidating. Moreover, older adults may not have the latest plug-ins installed. (Often they inherit their grandson’s hand-me-down computer with old software and slow processing speeds.) You don’t want seniors to arrive at your page and be greeted immediately with an error message or long download time. They will think that your site is broken!
- Narrow screens for small monitors. Because seniors, as a rule, are not power users, they are less likely to buy new equipment. I am glad to see the Medicare site designed to display well within what is now a “smaller” monitor (1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall). If vertical scrollbars are not intuitive, a scroll bar along the bottom, moving a screen from left to right is even less so!
What other tips have you found for making a site senior-friendly?
Tags: classic, Medicare, senior-friendly, Usability
Posted in Internet Marketing, Technology
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