Middle-Aged Users' Declining Web Performance

April 3, 2008 at 12:00 am PT

Between the ages of 25 and 60, the time users need to complete Web site tasks increases by 0.8% per year. In other words, a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time. … The biggest factor is that older users need more time to understand pages, scan the text, and extract the information.

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Tagged with: age, Alertbox, Jakob Nielson, Web performance

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Joe Loong

Interesting article, thanks for the link. With older (or more experienced) users, I think we see also see more cognitive lock-in — people prefer doing things the way they’re used to doing it (even if a new was is objectively “better”).

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