SeniorWorld Online
By Max Van Kleek
Are today's Seniors only interested in topics related to issues of
aging, recounting old stories, medicine and health, money management,
and world travel? That is the impression one will get when visiting
SeniorWorld Online. The SeniorWorld Online web site offers some useful
information - but limits itself to topics one typically associates
with STEREOTYPES of seniors.
It seems that the SeniorWorld site focuses too narrowly on topics
people who are not themselves Seniors would too readily attribute
as issues that seniors would find interesting. For example, in Health
and Medicine, topics include Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimers, Health
Care, and "Longevity", instead of perhaps more useful general
links to in-depth professional online health resources. Under the
News section, we are somewhat puzzled to find the section called "Senior
Stories", where seniors can submit stories of their life experiences
for perusal, presumably for their peers. This seems that it can hardly
be considered
News to me. Even the Art and Entertainment section seems limited
to turn-of-the-20th century silent films, banjo and Big Band music,
which is entirely off-the-mark for what music most seniors would listen
to. It became especially clear that SeniorWorld was missing its target
audience upon perusal of the Life, Leisure and Sports section. Under
this umbrella category, which seems to cover everything from Automotive
Repair,
Computer tutorials, to Religion, lies the category "Relationships".
Although this claims to be a section devoted to "the relationships
that our lives revolve around and how to make the most of them",
this link does not have a single resource devoted to senior dating,
matchmaking, or marriage. By the statistics that Chris Weaver cited
in lecture on March 16, we know that a very significant percentage
of seniors above 60 are still actively dating; a fact that is surprising
to most.
It is also disappointing that the SeniorWorld website does not design
its pages to take into account seniors' possibly declining eyesight,
motor coordination, and other disabilities. The web sites have a pastel
color scheme, which, would be fine if they had focused on better layout
and readability. The site neglects the readability of its articles,
using standard-sized, non-antialiased fonts. Titles of sections are
inconsistently aligned in a hodgepodge manner that might be confusing.
Even more annoying are the box-banner ads that crowd the content and
create visual noise on the entire right column of every page. Perhaps
worst of all, most pages are far too long to fit on a single page,
which means that they need to be scrolled (which is known to be abysmally
bad, due to spatial- perception issues, for most seniors). The tightly-packed,
crowded microfont "navigation bar" that at the very bottom
of every page on the web site seems it would be challenging for even
the slightly vision impaired, and entirely useless for most seniors
visiting the site.
Buildling resources based upon stereotypes is a dangerous thing to
do, particularly when aiming at large segments of the human population.
Ann Wrixon from SeniorNET described having witnessed every Senior-related
stereotype she had ever heard be shattered within her first couple
months as CEO of SeniorNet, as she joined large groups of SeniorNET
members on trips kayaking, dancing, and observed Seniors enthusiastically
adopting computer technology, accessing the Internet, and teaching
others how to do the same. Recognizing Seniors' real interests and
issues has helped her company become the one of the most successful
senior sites on the web; it seems that SeniorWorld needs to learn
lessons from SeniorNet.