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Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

Thought provoking article.

One difficult thing to grapple with here though is that my impression of the elderly is that the bulk of them are living on a tight budget to make sure that their retirement savings last them through their remaining years. Well designed, hip and beautiful products typically come at a hefty premium (think Apple tax). How many elderly people are willing to pay a premium for good, user friendly design?

Could it be that the reason we don't see better design for the elderly is because most of them are unwilling or unable to pay extra for it, unlike the young?

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I've upvoted this - I made desktop graphics software that I thought would be used by young web designers, but ended up being popular with a 60+ older demographic. (Think along the lines of "scrapbooking".)

They're wonderful people, but there was a lot of pressure to keep prices down because "I'm on a fixed income". That makes it harder to invest more time in design, even though you need to since they're your main market.

(I'm even aware of a couple of elderly 'customers' where "my son gets me all the software for free!", nudge wink torrents.)

Elderly users often require a lot more customer support and hand-holding than a customer in their 30s. Some really enjoy the customer support since for many of them it's one of their few social interactions of the day. Which is fine, but if the product also has to be cheap to meet a fixed income, it's hard to be profitable and have great design and excellent non-rushed non-offshored customer service.

Of course, not all customers are the same. I'm sure there were wealthy & savvy elderly customers too, but I didn't know how many because they never contacted customer support & so I never got to know them personally.

I don't think it's an affordability thing so much as perceived value. People will probably fixate on the products that they wanted at some impressionable age. It's a lot easier for me (being an old guy) to buy expensive stereo equipment even now than it would be to buy a $1000 cell phone.

As a group they have much more money than poor college students.

I think that’s a shallow analysis.

The difference is that college students expect to make more money in the future so they don’t put any thought into stretching their dollar. Retirees are the opposite. They may have bigger bank accounts, but for most of them, they know that’s all they’ll ever get.

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