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from the You-May-Be-Younger,-But-I-Have-Better-Insurance dept.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the article Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users but suspect that many Soylentils will find it useful.)
A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Web designers need to understand what older users need and why it's not enough to just say, "I can read it, so what's the problem?"
If you're my age you have no doubt run into more than a few web sites that are just plain useless, either because you can't read the text, or because they were designed using assumptions that those of us over forty years of age don't find useful. Whether it's our need for high contrast text, or our preference for actual words and paragraphs over video, the needs of older users often get ignored.
We are the generation that invented and grew up with personal computers. It's absurd to suggest that we are less capable of using technology. In other words, you can't complain about old people not understanding tech, and then also complain that they've taken over Facebook and Twitter. Besides, we also usually have lots more disposable income, so catering to our needs is good for business.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 23 2019, @01:32PM (1 child)
Contrary to popular belief, those who fall most often victim to internet and phone scams are the 24 and younger crowd, not the older people.
I don't see lack of trust as a problem. It's not a sign a dementia, it's a sign of wisdom.
(Score: 1) by Samantha Wright on Sunday November 24 2019, @10:56PM
Here's a source for that [experian.com]. A few caveats you might want to consider: successful scams of victims aged 65+ are so much more profitable than those of victims aged 18-24 that despite being about half as frequently reported, more money is made from them overall (assuming a population of 100 people, that'd be $5016 vs $4500), and that the most common type of scam reported by elderly victims is tech support related. Based on this sample of reported scams, I suspect there are actually far more scams of the elderly that go unreported, as tech support scamming is usually a form of ransoming (where you really do get use of your computer back at the end), whereas other scams tend to end with the victim left empty-handed and denied some good or service.
So: you might not actually be right.