CRITIQUE ARCHIVE

http://www.generationsonline.com

Generations Online: A new frontier for elders
By Christa Starr

Internet technology is making the world a smaller place, but only for those who have the know-how and the access to it. The oldest generations are the least likely to use this technology, but are the most likely to benefit from its communications pote

-Generations Online (www.generationsonline.com)

Statistically speaking, senior citizens are a very wealthy, very active, and very lonely group of people. The Internet holds numerous potential benefits for these seniors, and reciprocally, seniors can be a great benefit to the Internet. Many groups have studied how older adults process visual information, how their small motor and information processing skills change with age, and how they tend to use the Internet when they have access to it. The Generations Online project attempts to use those studies to further the cause of the seniors online, creating software designed to allay their fears regarding the digital realm.

Generations Online is not a web site. It is a web portal software package that retirement homes, libraries, and other institutions can install to help seniors become

accustomed to the wacky world of the Web. The visual pun of the software - a clothesline with objects hanging "online" - is intended to make the seniors more comfortable with simple web tasks like email (represented as postcards) and search functions (a reference book). The software also includes basic links to the types of web activities seniors have been found to enjoy - medical information, stock trading,

and various types of news and games.

Perhaps the best function of the software is its "Memories: Generation to Generation" section. This area allows seniors to interact with grade school students who have questions about the world in the years before they were born. By sharing their unique experiences and educating these children, elders are able to feel more connected to the world around them.

By keeping the color schemes of the software gentle and the fonts large, they have taken into account the difficulty of designing for older eyes. By keeping graphics and links large, they provide more clicking areas for those who have trouble handling a mouse. And by keeping the options to a minimum, they avoid overwhelming the users with the Web's abundance of information. However, I think that the limitations of the software will eventually become too confining for the users, and they will move beyond it into other Web arenas. But I also think the Generations Online project would agree. They seem to have built a nice starter application, with the hopes that seniors abandon the clothesline and move on to a more extensive online experience.