By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and co founder
Interesting article about telehealth shows that digitial divide between seniors and younger generations is a barrier in telehealth. Read more here. From this article: Blacker (AT&T) said lack of access to technology is a problem, especially among the elderly. “The ‘digital divide’ is a big problem because senior… citizens are the
group that is least likely to use digital technology,” West said.
It’s FamiliLink’s mission to overcome the digital divide!
By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co-founder FamiliLink
With families becoming smaller and living more dispersed finding easy ways to stay in touch becomes increasingly more important. Grandparents living far away from their grandchildren can feel lonely and disconnected from their loved ones. Today, caring family members are looking for solutions to easily connect and share their digital lives with their older loved ones. Remember the time when people use to print all their photos and make actual physical photo albums? Then it was easy to print “doubles” and have the extra photos dropped in the mail and sent to loved ones. Today, people’s lives are being captured digitally and online photo albums are becoming the “norm”. Digital photos and videos are easy and fun to share with more tech savvy family and friends, but this creates an even greater divide and disconnect with our older loved ones who are more technology challenged.
Families are trying a number of solutions to help their older loved ones stay connected, including digital picture frames and email…with little success. The frames require too much work to upload images at a special website. Older adults continue to struggle with email. (Studies show that seniors have twice as hard a time as their younger counterparts using the computer.) Research shows this to be a huge problem for millions of families. Of course there is always the phone and snail mail but everyone is becoming more and more digital. Fortunately seniors are increasingly going online and adopting email as a way to stay in touch with their loved ones. A recent article stated that in 2000, fewer than 20% of Americans older than 64 could access the Internet, but today 37% of Americans older than 64 are online. This is an 85% increase in just eight years. From the same article some other interesting facts:
Time to look into what the internet has to offer grandparents who want to stay in touch. Email is an obvious solution; others are webcam, instant messenger, Skype and online sharing sites like Kodakgallery, Flickr, Shutterfly and even Facebook. These are all valuable but have some disadvantages for both the tech savvy user and the more technology challenged grandparent. These disadvantages include:
FamiliLink fulfills this need by aggregating family content for the grandparent at one place with a very simple to use interface. Grandchildren can send photos as an attachment to the grandparent’s FamiliLink email address and the photos will automatically display at their FamiliLink page. The grandparent can easily enlarge the photos received, forward them to others and view them as a slide show.
So far the ability to view photos and also videos at one place definitely has proven one of the killer apps for FamiliLink users together with just simply having all social content of people that matter most conveniently aggregated at one place. No need to follow complicated links or download attachments.
By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co-Founder FamiliLink
I never realized that a simple error message would require so much thought, especially when considering the needs of an older audience. FamiliLink’s user interface is specifically designed for older adults and therefore requires ongoing usability testing. One of our early learning points was the significant importance of error message for our older users. The language and text has very specific requirements. Our first usability study indicated that several of our error messages describe a problem but didn’t provide solutions. Older Users like to understand what to do to fix the problem (for instance, the statement “invalid user name” could be very frustrating to a senior user…what do I do about an invalid user name? When older users do not know how to solve problems that arise, it can leave them frustrated and unable to move forward. They already approach the computer with some fear and intimidation. So it is vitally important that error messages be proactive and offer the elderly users with potential solutions.
Some additional research showed similar results:
· Error messages are often hard to read, either because the wording is obscure or imprecise, or the message’s placement on the page is easily overlooked. Simplicity is even more important than usual when seniors encounter error handling: The message should focus on the error, explain it clearly, and make it as easy as possible to fix. (Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/seniors.html)
· As older adults move onto the Web, many report that maneuvering online can be intimidating. Take George McKinney, a 73-year-old retired structural engineer in San Diego who uses the Internet to research stocks. He often shuts down his computer in frustration, for example when he enters a stock symbol and gets an error message that doesn’t tell him exactly what he did wrong.
Mr. McKinney’s online experience is common among older adults. “They can often be stumped by even the smallest problem,” says Jakob Nielsen, a co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif., a consulting firm that specializes in optimizing the user experience on the Internet. (Source:http://www.suddenlysenior.com/wsjgrowupseniorwebsites.html)
I did a little research myself and went to some services online that target older adults like Finerday, AARP and Commino. Deliberately I tried to log in with mistakes to see what kind of error message would show. Here are some examples:
· Sorry, this username is unknown.
For seniors this error message is too abbreviated and there is no potential solution what to do next. Why is it unknown?
· Please enter a valid e-mail address and password. This error message only provides the solution. Seniors like to know what they did wrong. This message could be frustrating because I will think to myself…I did enter an email address and password.
· You ID or password you typed is incorrect. Please Click OK and then retype the your ID and password, or Register if you haven’t already done so. This error message is better for seniors as it indicates what was wrong.In terms of wording, seniors are insecure when using the computer and words as incorrect are sometimes perceived intimidating. Your ID is not recognized is probably better received. It also probably should be shorter.
More on error message text I found at this website:
· Make sure the error message identifies the related field with the name as it is written in the label for that field.
· Do not use complicated words
· Describe what the user should do to correct the error, especially if it could be difficult to understand.
· Make it clear if there were more than one error so that the user can correct all errors at once.
Summarizing: Error messages especially for older adults need to state the problem first followed by the possible solution and what to do next. The text needs to be as short and crisp as possible and positive. Not using terms as not valid incorrect etc. At FamiliLink we are working hard to clean up all our error messages and so our senior users have a positive and rewarding user experience. You can visit us at www.familiLink.com and let us know how we are doing.
By Laura Nuhaan, Co-Founder and CEO FamiliLink
We started this blog to share our experiences in building a company from scratch and how seniors use the internet and computers. We also like to keep you updated on our services and progress along the road.
Inger Rarick (linkedin profile) and I (http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauranuhaan) started this company in the summer of 2007 as we both felt a strong drive to solve the need to include our older loved ones in the increasingly complicated digital family loop. Not only driven by our own parents who were frustrated when they couldn’t see the latest photos or videos posted on Flickr, Picasa but also from both our working experience. Prior to FamiliLink I worked with a Tele Monitoring company where a few things became very clear to me. First of all there are many people out there that need to take care of their aging parent. It’s estimated that 34 million Americans serve as unpaid caregivers for other adults, usually elderly relatives, and that they spend an average 21 hours a week helping out, according to a study being released by AARP . Millions more grown children are calling regularly, flying into town every few weeks or months or just stopping by to take Mom or Dad to the doctor. ( For the whole article click here). I learned that Tele Monitoring of elderly patients often didn’t include family members were often in the communications. There was no social “hook” to help keep the elderly patients interested. Probably contribution to the fact that Tele Monitoring till today still has not been widely implemented. Inger has worked directly with seniors and their families in a variety of health care settings where she has seen firsthand the physical and psychological effects loneliness has on seniors. Study results have shown that seniors who feel lonely have 50 % greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease, depression and heart disease.
After intensive research and usability studies with seniors and family members we recently launched our alpha site where we are offering a single place for seniors to easily stay in touch with their friends and family while allowing family members to use their preferred forms of online communications to stay in touch.
One of the misunderstandings we frequently encounter is that younger generations often assume that seniors use the internet and computers the same way as they do. This is absolutely not true. Studies show that seniors have twice as hard a time using the internet (link to fact). Plus age-related conditions prevent seniors from using computers the way they use it. Just as a person who ages sometimes needs a cane or special assistance, why would a senior not have special needs as it relates to the computer?
We asked LinkedIn contacts the following: What are the problems your parents or grand parents experience when using the computer or internet? This is one illustrative answer we got from Poland:
well, consider my family - father, 70, mother 68.
My mother wouldn’t go near a PC - she thinks it’s absolutely useless to her, just like Full HD TV with 500 channels. My father has a PC and uses it, although he would need everything explained in very different way I would ie. instead of just a windows with the command browse or upload - the instructions would need to be something like if you want to upload a picture, you need to click here, go to a directory on you hard drive (the thing you keep your files on), select the image you want to upload, click ok, click upload, wait a while until it uploads, then enjoy. Or even better - put images in the instructions. Also the older generation tends to click yes on every popup they see, whether it’s harmless or harmful. They don’t use any plugins, any ad-blockers etc.
More answers from others at
http://www.linkedin.com/mbox?displayQuestionsReceived=&trk=hb_side_qa
Follow FamiliLink on Vator.tv
