11 Guidelines for Writing Microcopy that Helps Older Adults Use Your Product

Written by Dr. Michal Halperin Ben Zvi and Kinneret Yifrah

Photo by Fred Moon on Unsplash

Let’s take a moment to slash some myths:

Myth 1

There are fewer and fewer older adults who struggle to use digital media. Pretty soon everyone, no matter what age, will know how to use digital media with zero limitations.

The truth

Even the most digital-savvy person will experience eventually a decline in the speed of thinking, eyesight, and other aspects that can impact the ability to use a digital product. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with their knowledge and skills of digital media (aka digital literacy).

Even if you were born with a mobile device in hand, you won’t be able to manage digital products the same way you do today — not to mention the increasingly rapid rate of digital change (you know, feeling old at the age of 30 whenever you hear teenagers talk?).

Conclusion: Older people who struggle with technology aren’t going anywhere and their numbers aren’t decreasing. On the contrary; this user segment is expanding, and we all hope to someday be a part of it.

Myth 2

Most older adults find technology daunting, have minimal digital knowledge and little motivation to learn.

The truth

Older adults shop online, make online money transfers, buy airplane tickets online (in a COVID-free world) and read online magazines and news.

In fact, 28% of online shopping in the US is done by people over 65, and in Israel more than half of the older population possesses a medium to a high level of digital literacy and plenty of motivation to be independent and take part in the digital sphere.

Conclusion: many older people can, know and want to be digitally active. Technology for them can create a discouraging experience of:

• “what do they want from me” or
• “I’m too old for this” or
• “they’ve given up on me”

But it can also create an empowering “that was so easy for me to do!” type of experience. And we as writers and designers have the power to give them that.

Myth 3

To design and write a digital product that older adults can use, you need to strip the screen of everything that’s fun and just leave a big button that says “Click here”.

The truth

Small changes we can easily implement — fine-tuning — can significantly increase usability for older adults. And all users will probably benefit from them, too.

So whether your target audience includes many older users, or you want to offer a high-usability product for everyone, there are a few important things you have to know.

Who are “older adults” anyway?

The older population (65+) is more diverse than any other age group. With a span that can reach even 40 years, the variance is incredible. Grouping all older people together is simply wrong. Still, there’s no way around generalizing to an extent if we want to create guidelines for writing and designing for older users.

The psychological information presented here is research-based, but we’re well aware that it’s littered with generalization. It’s a practical choice and we’re aware of it.

Let’s get to it. How do you write microcopy that older users can handle?

1. Involving older adults in all product stages

Let’s be honest: Most product teams don’t include people over 65. What’s more, when talking about diversity in teams or users, we usually think about gender, race, ethnicity, or people with disabilities and less about age diversity.

In order to see if our older users understand what we wrote and find out what they call things and what words they use, they have to be involved in the process.

How and when to do it?

a. Before you start writing — ensure representation of older adults in UX research and content strategy, and listen carefully to the words they use, how they phrase things and how they think.

b. While you write — ask older adults of different ages to accompany the process, occasionally share phrasing you’re debating and get their feedback.

c. After writing — include older adults in usability testing and see what they understand of the microcopy you wrote, and what requires change or simplification.

2. Older adults take longer to process and need more control over the process

The most important thing to remember is that the pace of information processing declines with age. Simply put, the older we get, the slower we think and respond. It has nothing to do with digital literacy, and it will happen to you, too.

For every second a young person takes to perform a task, an older person requires 1.4 to 1.7 seconds.

This, by the way, is why older adults take longer to hit the gas when the light changes. Don’t honk, breathe.

So what do you do with digital products?

Make sure your users can control their pace of progress and avoid having things happen too quickly or go beyond their control.

a. Toast messages

If a significant portion of your user base are older users, avoid toasts — those messages that pop up and disappear on their own at the edges of the screen (usually the top or bottom).

Let users close the message, or if you can’t, keep them running for long — real long — before they disappear, so as to give users enough time to notice them, read, understand and act without pressure.

That’s actually a good example of change that can help ALL of your users; why stress them out when you can leave the message up for longer and let them read at their own pace? It’s a much more pleasant experience for everyone involved.

Most examples and screenshots here are grabbed from an Israeli supermarket chain’s website (they’re translated from Hebrew). They have great microcopy that only needs a few tweaks to make it usable for older users too. These tooltips pop up on the top right corner of the screen for one second when adding or removing an item from the cart:

There are two problems here:

One is that they disappear too quickly. It’s too fast for any user, not just the older ones. But older users in particular won’t have enough time to look up and see the tooltip at the top of the screen, read it, process the information and ensure that the desired action indeed took place. As far as they’re concerned, something just flashed at the top of the page, distracted them and disappeared without them even seeing what it was.

A tooltip that disappears too quickly gives that disappointing “digital isn’t for me” feeling — even though the problem lies with the product and not the user — and the feeling that those who created the interface simply gave up on them.

So what should you do?

Toasts and automatic tooltips have to stay up for much longer. You should also enlarge the keyword (added/removed) or even make it the only word in the tooltip, so it can be absorbed more easily.

The second problem is that the tooltips pop up on the top right side of the screen, while the users are still focused on one of the items in the main part of the screen. Older users will be distracted by something that pops up somewhere else entirely (because selective attention decreases), and once they shift their gaze, they’ll have a hard time returning to where they left off.

B. Create a clear, static field environment

First of all, static field labels are preferable to floating placeholders that become labels. Besides, with hints and assistive texts it’s better to have a static, permanent text rather than an appearing and disappearing tooltip, whether automatically or by clicking.

In this example, the instruction is static and permanent, so you can read and process it at your own pace, which is great, but the field label floats. It would be better to have a static label.

Before entering a field:

After entering a field:

By the way, just make sure that screen-reader users have the instructions read out to them before entering the field, even though they appear after (focus must be shifted to it before entering the field. Read more guidelines for writing accessible microcopy).

3. Older adults are more bound to slip up and perform actions they didn’t mean to

With age comes a decline in management and control capabilities (executive functions), meaning that we are less able to initiate, persist, delay or change responses.

The positive: The older we get, the less we care what others think about us, and the freer we are to act and talk as we wish.

The challenging: It gets harder for us to stop and ask if we really want to click that specific button, especially if it’s prominent. Older people make more of these reckless mistakes and click attractive, prominent buttons before realizing what those buttons actually do.

And there’s the catch because a lot of older users would rather not take unnecessary risks (we’ll elaborate in just a bit). So erroneous clicking on buttons and random links is a cause for excessive stress and concern.

Pair that with what we talked about earlier — controlling the pace — and we’ll see that the solution is to add friction and in some cases also options points. This is particularly true for products that involve money, medical status and personal information.

Friction as a function

(Thank you, Marvily Meirav HP, for this term)

When it comes to destructive actions (erasing an item, exiting without saving, etc.) or ones from which there’s no going back (e.g. selecting a username that can’t be changed later), don’t settle for an undo option, and certainly don’t present it as a toast message. We’ve already seen that this concept is far too fast for older users.

Instead, add some friction before execution — a confirmation dialogue– and make it short, clear and explicit (Read more guidelines for writing great confirmation dialogues).

Here’s a great confirmation dialogue:

The Delete main delivery address option also has a good dialogue that can prevent premature deletion:

In the following example we see that the secondary address is deleted without a confirmation dialogue. After clicking Delete address, a toast message pops up for less than a second to tell us that the address was deleted.

But to unintentionally delete an entire address — including zip code, floor, apartment number — kind of sucks. In order for older adults to feel at ease with your product, confirm that they indeed wanted to perform that deletion.

4. Older adults are less versed in design trends

Forget about “everybody knows what that means,” particularly when it comes to icons and digital jargon.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, labels significantly improve icon usability — for all users, not just older ones. That’s why they recommend to always add a word to the icon, even to standard ones.

This test also found that adding a word to the icon significantly improved user prediction regarding its function and what will happen once it’s clicked. This certainty generates more clicks.

So don’t just settle for icons, assuming that they’re standard and everyone can understand them. Add a word or two that tell what they mean.

There, isn’t that great? Even the magnifying glass and cart icons benefit from a label:

This is also true for success messages: our ability to learn from encouragements and feedback is not affected in old age, and some studies have found that even in states of dementia, susceptibility to rewards or punishments doesn’t disappear. So don’t just use an appearing and disappearing green checkmark; point out success explicitly and write it out:

“Payment received, thank you!”

5. Older adults read and analyze every word

Ever heard of the Stroop effect? That’s when we see a written word and immediately think of its semantic meaning, much faster than its visible attributes (for example, first we’ll understand what is written, and only then what color it was written in. See Wikipedia entry for Stroop effect).

As we get older, the Stroop effect intensifies, and written stimuli get more and more attention.

This means that for older users, the written word (i.e., the microcopy) has greater significance than other design components. The older we get, the more we tend to stick to written text, read the words carefully and assess their meaning. Older users focus on the text and put more effort into reading and deciphering each word.

Every word counts even more

Our copy has to be a lot less wordy and winding. That means being more straightforward and not adding another sentence just to get on people’s good side, yet remain relatable.

In this example, the headline and first sentence complicate things, and older users will take several minutes to figure out what this message says:

A simple, more empowering, relatable text could be:

The same goes for this message after logging in. The sentence is too long and convoluted:

A better alternative might be:

6. Older adults understand faster words they actually use

Did you know? Older users have a larger vocabulary than young users. Still, because of the Stroop effect mentioned earlier, older users have a harder time bridging the gap between the words they use on a daily basis and rarer synonyms.

Examples

If users usually say “groceries” but the site calls them “items” or “products”, older users will struggle to relate the two. The same goes for using “commutes” instead of “rides”, and so on.

The greater the distance between the written word and the common word, the more complex the link between them.

So if a large portion of your user base are older users, it’s more important than ever to talk to them at the strategic stage of writing and learn what they call the key phrases you plan on using, then use the ones most commonly used.

7. Older adults view error messages as a personal failure

Young users who encounter an error message would gather that they need to do something differently, or that there’s some kind of problem with the product. Conversely, older users will often blame their own inadequacy (“Oh, what have I done?”) and feel like they don’t understand or aren’t able to “make it on their own” (studies show that even tablets with unfamiliar apps make them feel older!).

So error messages, if not handled properly, might harm older users’ sense of competence and independence. In addition, it would take them longer to process the information presented in the error message and understand what went wrong and how to fix it.

In order to clarify that the problem lies with the system and not the user, and in order to rebuild a sense of competence, we have to pay more attention to our error messages.

a. Separate error messages for each scenario

Say goodbye to generic error messages, the type that supposedly fits several scenarios. Instead, make sure that the system can figure out what caused the error and put up the relevant, specific message (yes, that requires more development). That way, each error scenario has to have a specific explanation that says what happens and, most importantly, how to fix it.

The amount of possible scenarios often makes product managers give up beforehand and create a generic message for all scenarios (or a few of them), but this is a mistake. With multiple scenarios, you need to map out their frequency and produce as many individual messages for as many common scenarios as possible.

This message comes up in several scenarios, which explains the generic “something went wrong” phrasing:

Older people, more than younger ones, find this message discouraging. Going “back to the home page” means starting everything over without even knowing what went wrong — whether everything I did was saved, and how to avoid mistakes the next time around — it’s a frustrating task. It gives a sense of helplessness and is highly likely to cause abandonment and a feeling that “this isn’t for me”.

The system must identify what caused the error and most of all, send a message that explains what needs to be done in that specific case. Here’s an example that starts like the previous one, but ends much better:

b. Excellent error message copy

Don’t leave it till the end and don’t neglect it during development. Write error messages together with the product, development and content teams, to ensure that they are coherent and simple, explain the problem and encourage a simple, constructive action.

Of course, don’t forget to examine the reaction to error messages in your usability tests.

c. Add inline feedback

Don’t wait for the action to be completed to pop up errors across the form; validate after each field, immediately alert if there’s a problem and, most importantly, what it is and how to solve it.

As always, red isn’t enough. Add explanatory text.

d. Prevent error messages ahead of time

Older adults tend to read everything, as we saw earlier, so detailed instructions can really help them navigate a form without running into any error messages.

Provide as much preliminary information as you can on how to fill in the fields: what data is needed, in what format and where to find that information.

8. Older adults are less likely to venture off on digital adventures

Being able to successfully predict what will happen when I click the button or icon is a main component of our feeling of competence when using digital tools. So when we click a button and what happens is the opposite of what we expected, our feeling of control over the product and situation is damaged.

Like with error messages, young users will probably quickly go back, blame the product and continue on to the next action. Older users, on the other hand, will take longer to go back and fix it. In fact, even if they already learned that a certain action leads to a dead-end or an unwanted path, they would have a hard time not repeating that same action the next time.

Beyond the click: buttons should be very clear and unambiguous

Instead of generic Send, New or Next buttons, write specific two/three-word buttons that together clarify precisely what will happen when the button is clicked:

• Send message
• Create new email
• Next step: payment

Here, it would have been better to write “add to cart” because that could imply that the button would take us to the cart page.

And here’s a button that says exactly what will happen when you click it (it’s more explicit than, say, “empty cart”)”:

For this same reason, we have to make sure that operational, functional buttons aren’t too creative.

The next empty state is great and drives the user to begin shopping, but what happens when I click “I brought my own list”? What will happen when I click “Quick shop”?

For us UX pros, these buttons are an itch we have to scratch and find out what’s hiding behind them. Worst case scenario, I’ll just go back and continue where I left off. But this spirit of digital adventure — the tendency to take risks — declines with age. Older adults will just feel left out and avoid clicking them, because each new screen requires a lot of resources to analyze, and you can never tell if you’ll be able to go back exactly to where you were.

By the way, look at the “I brought my own list” button. It makes a somewhat unclear connection between the digital realm and the real world. older people who hold onto a physical list will have a hard time bridging this gap and understanding what it is they have to do with the actual list they brought with them.

Another place on the site provides more information, but it’s still not enough:

Clicking Quick shop still demands a great measure of digital adventurousness, and that’s a shame because older adults could benefit from this shortcut feature — perhaps even more than other users. Spend a few words on explaining what’s about to happen, for example: We’ll suggest popular products.

Also, increase the font size to 16–22.

9. Older adults are more afraid of risks

Older people often struggle to remember where the information they remember came from. This means that oftentimes, older people with some awareness of fraud will read carefully any request for personal details and will be more suspicious of it, simply because they heard somewhere about internet fraud.

So if we’re asking our users to do something, we have to explain:

• Why are we asking for this information?
• What will we be doing with it?
• Why should users fill in their details/move forward/act? What do they get out of it?

This is always true but if a large portion of our user base are older adults, it requires special attention.

This, for example, is the first form you see when creating an account:

To increase motivation to fill it and to alleviate concerns, add a short sentence explaining why so many personal details are asked: “So we can send your shopping to your home and contact you about your orders”. By the ID and phone number fields, I would also explain why these specific details are required — after all, they’re not necessary for shopping.

10. Recommendation: present one question or one topic per screen

In recent years we’ve been seeing more and more products that break down the form or task into single questions or groups of questions, presented on different screens.

Here are just a few: Lemonade, Stitch Fix, Loom, H&R Block, Ada health app, Elevate app

Here are some examples from Localize:

Here are some examples from Mixtiles:

Advantage #1: For writers, this flow allows us to provide more information about each question and present the explanation in a clear, static manner.

Advantage #2: For users, and older users in particular, this flow lets them focus on one thing at a time without being overwhelmed; they can carefully read the question and instructions and fully control their processing and pace of progress.

Advantage #3: The user gets instant feedback from each separate screen. If there’s an issue, it’s presented immediately instead of dragging on, and if there’s a success — it’s also presented immediately, motivating the user to move on to the next stage.

Advantage #4: Because there’s only one question per screen, users succeed more times (success for each question, not just once at the end) and their sense of competence intensifies. This sense of success is important for all of us and particularly important for older people, because they often see themselves as non-technological, and repeated positive feedback will show them that it is possible — and even easy!

So if a large portion of our user base are older adults, consider breaking down forms.

The form above (and the whole process) should be broken down (and tested, of course) like so:

1. Name and ID number: To get to know you and sign you up for the service + explain why an ID number is requested
2. Contact details: To contact you about your orders and send you confirmations and receipts
3. Address: Where to deliver your order
4. Choose password: To keep your account secure

11. Older adults tag messages as spam and unreliable

Always — in all products and for all users — avoid being cutesy or overly-fun, but still remain human and approachable.

If a large portion of our user base are older adults, being cutesy won’t only feel forced and interrupt information processing (as we’ve seen earlier) — it might also damage older users’ trust to the point of disqualifying the product or marking it as spam.

This is particularly true in the following cases:

1. Financial products
2. Health-related products
3. Payment
4. Request for personal information
5. Clicking links (in text messages, for example)
6. Identification and password reset

In all of these cases, be extremely straightforward and particularly avoid:

a. Over-personifying the product. This message by a credit card provider is likely to be viewed by older users as spam or a message trying to pry their PIN; they will likely not click it.

b. Unreliable, questionable or downright unrealistic statements such as “We’re waiting for you!” or “Great choice!”

In short: keep it simple, straightforward and reliable.

Conclusion

You don’t need a revolution in order for your digital product to fit a vast audience of older adults and not make them feel like “this isn’t for me”.

What you need is to first of all incorporate older people in all stages of research, then pay attention to small details that will answer — easily — older adults’ need for more control, alleviating concerns, considering every word, being transparent about what’s about to happen and recognizing their basic need — feeling independent and competent.

Eventually, it’s going to benefit all of your users. Guaranteed.

One final thought

If you increase the number of actions made by older users in your product, not only did you achieve more engagement and transactions, you also did something for the good of the world and helped them feel a part of something. Is there anything better than that?

Dr. michal halperin ben zvi: Expert on the psychology of aging. Michal’s research focuses on how older adults perceive and learn the digital sphere, and how we should create digital tools that suit the older population. Michal is also a knowledge development director at the Israeli National Initiative for the Promotion of Digital Literacy Among Older Adults, at JDC-ESHEL, and consultant on developing and adapting digital and non-digital services to the older population.

Kinneret Yifrah: Microcopy expert and UX writer. She’s written microcopy for dozens of brands, websites, apps, and public services. She is the curator of The UX Writing Library and teaches writers, designers, and product pros how to create an extraordinary user experience through words. Her digital course and innovative book are in daily use by professionals from more than 50 countries.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.