From User-Centered Design to Senior-Centered Design: Designing Internet Health Information Portals

Abstract

Seniors are increasingly using websites to access health-related information. We developed a portal website that provides health information for seniors based on a user-centered, participatory design approach to ensure that the resulting website meets the special needs and requirements of senior users, a group traditionally neglected in the development process. Our approach included five major steps in the development process: needs analysis, requirements specification, content design, iterative prototype design, and usability evaluation. Seniors were actively involved as part of the design team by participating in a variety of focus groups and online surveys throughout this development process. They were particularly helpful in providing design requirements and in identifying usability problems related to both web page content, web design features, and website navigation. This paper is a case study that explains our development process and summarizes lessons learned from our efforts to extend user-centered design to this special population of users. We concluded that user-centered design could be extended to senior-centered design quite successfully.

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