TACKLING UI & CX
Generation Overlooked: Serving silver user s GUEST EDITOR Natasha de Terán
Designing for an inclusive future Technology doesn’t discriminate; people do. If banking apps and services were built to be used by our grandparents, everyone would benefit, says Sue Scott “You need to understand how rare it is to ask good questions of old people.” That’s Muriel. She was 91 when an organisation in the United States called Older Adults Technology Services, or OATS, began asking questions of her and her friends. They weren’t the usual playlist of likes and dislikes asked of focus groups by designers building the sleekest, fastest, most frictionless apps. Because the starting point for OATS giving older adults the motivation to go digital, or to go further with digital, wasn’t about using the technology at all. Rather, it sought to understand what an individual (and it’s reached 35,000 seniors so far) needed in order to – as founder and executive director Thomas Kamber puts it – ‘age with attitude’. The technology skills, including digital finance ones, were then fitted around the answer. Change is hard at any age, says Kamber. And, if you want someone to change the habits of most of a lifetime, you need to really convince them of the value in doing so. Defining the relative advantage of adopting a tool or not, is one of the biggest challenges anyone targeting the older demographic faces, especially in financial services where there might be a perceived risk attached. As an organisation, OATS believes that the antidote to ageism is a thoughtful approach ffnews.com
to technology design. Sadly, Kamber doubts that the percentage of fintech products tested among older people even reaches into double digits. And, in his view, that means older users don’t feel loved or appreciated by those organisations which might quite like more of them to use their services. “People need to find things that are aspirational to themselves and feel like their voices are represented,” he says. According to a report published by The Financial Health Network in the US in 2020,
the vast majority of over-50s there clearly haven’t been feeling zloved or listened to: “The lack of focus on older users persists in the fintech community,” it said. And yet, as Age UK’s Age-friendly Banking study had pointed out four years earlier: “One of the insights of age-friendly banking is that if a bank can provide good service for its oldest customers, it can provide excellent service for all. The young and the middle-aged navigate the same systems as older people, but may have greater resilience in coping with poor design – for example, being able to access bank services through alternative channels. A bank that improves its systems and services to assist its older customers is likely to find the rest of its customers delighted by the improvement.” Issue 12 | ThePaytechMagazine
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