Designing for your future self

I have attended the meet-up which was organised by ladies that UX London . As usual a fantastic evening and the most important thing is the really important topic which most of us missed/forget/neglect/left many times.

The highlight of the event was that the speakers were experienced industry researchers and their insight to the topic was amazing.

During the talk, they started with behaviour of old people and grasp the area of their needs. She also covered the area of physical body degradation by the age and how we all are going to effect by it. So if we start considering designs which also include older people requirements, then we are actually designing for ourself  and as human, we care about ourself more than anyone else.

One important slide while designing anything is:

There were many heart touching moments when we saw the videos of old people how they used technology and started to blame themselves rather than technology.

This quote definitely my ‘quote of the day’ when someone asked an old man why you press the touch screen so hard:

‘It’s like a doorbell, you assume you have to press it long and hard to get someone to hear you.’

The good thing during the presentation is they discussed the solutions how to deal with that and I personally like the idea of testing with teenage and an old person. 

Here is the slide deck of the event for the full list of strategies we should keep in mind and start introducing them now (if not doing already) in our products.

My opinion as a UX enthusiast and a developer, it is important to implement at least accessibility standards in your product and never go with assumptions. If we are neglecting older people now, our older-self will suffer.