Age-Related Differences in Eye Tracking and Usability Performance: Website Usability for Older Adults

Abstract

Cognitive decline is inherent with age. Despite known cognitive limitations, older adults are generally not taken into account during website design. Understanding age-related differences in website navigation is instructive for website design, especially considering the growing number of older adults who use the Internet. This article presents usability and eye-tracking data from five independent website usability studies that included younger and older participants. Overall results revealed age-dependent differences in eye movement and performance during website navigation on some of the sites. In particular, older participants had lower accuracy in one study and took longer to complete tasks in two studies compared to younger participants, they looked at the central part of the screen more frequently than younger participants in two studies, and they looked at the peripheral left part of the screen less frequently and took longer to first look at the peripheral top part of the screen than younger participants in one study. These data highlight the potential for age-related differences in performance while navigating websites and provide motivation for further exploration. Implications for website design and for usability practitioners are discussed.

Notes

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Jennifer Romano Bergstrom is now at Fors Marsh Group LLC, and Matt Jans is at California Health Interview Survey, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. This article is released to inform interested parties of research and to encourage discussion. Any views expressed on the methodological issues are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau. We thank Elizabeth D. Murphy, Rolando A. Rodriguez, and Hadley C. Bergstrom for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

¹Efficiency scores were not calculated for Study 3 because the site was not fully functioning; thus, an efficiency measure would have been uninformative.

²One participant answered all the tasks incorrectly, thus his data were not included in the efficiency measure.