User evaluation of age-centred web design guidelines

Abstract

We report an evaluation of a set of age-centred web design guidelines (SilverWeb guidelines) with older web users. We invited 24 older web users and used a cooperative evaluation to validate the guidelines and collect any additional problems. As a result of the experiment, 36 out of the original 37 guidelines were accepted, 1 guideline was disagreed with, and 5 new issues that were not covered by the guidelines were identified by users. Our findings show that input from users is a valuable contribution to the development process of web design guidelines and is essential in order to ensure a user-centred design approach. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.