Important but invisible: What the Aging Workforce Needs from Design -- Big Design Dallas 2015
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The document discusses the challenges facing an aging workforce and calls on designers to be more aware, understanding and empathetic. It notes that over 22.5 million people in the US are working past retirement age for reasons like feeling productive and staying connected. However, older workers face difficulties using tools and technologies not designed with their needs in mind. The document urges designers to gain a better understanding of the aging process and how it can impact tasks like processing information. With awareness and empathy, designers can help ensure workflows, training and technologies are inclusive of an aging workforce.
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Important but invisible: What the Aging Workforce Needs from Design -- Big Design Dallas 2015
- 1. What the Aging Workforce Needs From Design Important But Invisible
- 2. We are problem solvers.
- 3. I come to you with a challenge.
- 5. 22.5 million people working past retirement age in US
- 6. Lifespan has increased by 15 years in the last 50 years 68.2 1950 79.1 2015 83.86 2050
- 7. They stay working for 3 reasons
- 9. What are they doing?
- 10. The things we don't think about or take for granted
- 11. 12 3-6 7 8 9-12 13 Meet Jim (Jim is real. This is not a real photo of him.)
- 13. Important things many designers never see.
- 14. 22.5 million people working in an uncertain business environment with [insert adjective here] coworkers using tools and apps with little to no support or training.
- 18. “Technology has fundamentally changed the ways in which society operates such that exclusion from technology can mean exclusion from society.” Karyn Moffatt. 2013. Older-adult HCI: why should we care?. interactions 20, 4 (July 2013), 72-75. DOI=10.1145/2486227.2486242 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2486227.2486242
- 20. Older adults in a need position are doing whatever they can to stay employed.
- 21. But what’s not clear is whether we want them to go or stay. HR professionals face challenges with aging work force. Ardon Schambers. http://www.grbj.com/articles/74434-hr-professionals-face-challenges-with-aging-work-force
- 22. Young industry. Legacy businesses. Clients and teams who want to push the envelope.
- 23. It's not intentional. None of us really mean to make things harder
- 24. So what can we do?
- 25. Not software Not cooler interfaces Not backlogged or roadmapped. Not new design methods
- 26. Some basic human stuff
- 28. Being aware of our actions
- 29. NFB v. Target $6MM settlement $3.8MM award
- 31. Colvin v. Paddle Wheel Inn Filed 2013
- 32. Will there be an ADA lawsuit filed because a digital tool is unusable, reasonable accommodations cannot or will not be made, and an employee is dismissed for cause?
- 33. Understand what happens as we age.
- 37. Understanding 200% longer to process information Doing 25%-200% more time to acquire and act 1.5-2x longer to visually identify target Seeing 2007 - The Model Human Processor 37
- 39. Practice empathy on the job
- 44. Because the system changed the workflows, coworkers ran into trouble, quotas weren’t met, and some almost lost their jobs.
- 47. This is really about us
- 48. 1978
- 49. 10 PRINT “1979” 20 GOTO 10
- 50. 10 PRINT “1982” 20 GOTO 10 http://www.oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html
- 52. 2000 2001 2005 2007 2008 2009 2012 2014
- 53. 1979 → 1991 → 2000-2015
- 54. This is really about us
Notas do Editor
- Meet my mother, Donna. She’s had 2 “careers” in her life. She was a florist for about 20 years, and after that shop closed, she went to work as a teller for a small local bank. Today, she’s still at that bank where she handles new customer accounts, supports those accountholders and manages the bank’s electronic banking systems. If there’s a problem with the ATMs or the online banking platform, she’s the go-to person. That’s a role she’s had for the last 5-6 years. She’s looking forward to retiring at the end of this year. So much so, she has one of those gag “retirement countdown clocks” on a shelf next to their kitchen table. About a year ago, she sent me her first MMS message - a picture of her dog’s toy. We’ll work on the spell check and autocorrect. While she manages her bank’s electronic banking systems, doing something as simple as sending a picture message made her feel awesome. But who really thinks of the person setting up a new banking account? We take the latter for granted, but the former is something many of us would feel is more important.
- There are about 22.5 million people in the US who will work past the traditional 65yo retirement age. My mother may be one of them; her retirement is not a certainty.
- These folks work, in part, because they can. Healthcare and healthy approaches to living are driving “60 is the new 40” memes. US life expectancy by birth year (http://www.data360.org/export.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=195) 1950 - 68.2 yrs 1980 - 73.7 yrs 2015 - 79.1 yrs 2025 - 80.5 yrs 2050 - 83.86 yrs
- But they stay in the workforce for 3 basic reasons.
- First, about 1/3 just want to stay connected to other people. Their friends, family and even just seeing other people keeps them feeling alive and good about themselves. Next, there’s about 1/3 who work. That’s what they do. They don’t necessarily need the money or the benefits, but they do feel the need to be productive and contributing. Lastly, there’s the 1/3, or 7.5 million, who need the money and/or the benefits.
- They’re doing some pretty important things. They’re, like my mother, working in consumer banking. They’re working in insurance, education, or getting job training to do new things. Or getting job retraining to do their old jobs in new ways. Or getting upskilled so that they can take on a new role in their current business.
- In other words, they’re doing things we don’t really think about, we rarely - if ever - see, or we just take for granted.
- Jim has one of those jobs we just take for granted. About 5 years ago, I worked with a consultancy on an insurance project. Part of this project was a contextual inquiry to learn how companies get their employees on an insurance plan. The client’s goals were to get new insurance clients set up and “installed” in half the time (2 wks → 1 wk) and with half the error rate. Jim was one of about 5-6 people I spent a day learning from. I was about 37 when this happened, and I was the youngest person in the room by a long shot. Jim and many of his coworkers had been at this company for 15, 20, 25 years. It’s a company you go to work at and retire from. He knows the business inside and out, and let me walk you through what I saw. First, we start off with a (1) sheaf of employee insurance forms and the group insurance application. He organized the papers in the order _he knew_ they would need to be entered. Second, we start in on (2) data entry in a (3-6) mainframe terminal application. Then his phone rings and he has to take that call. Next, he goes into a hutch above his desk to pull out a binder with supporting information on this customer’s type of business. Depending on the type of business, the size or the geographic location of the business, Jim would need to enter a couple things differently. Once he has that info, (8) he goes into another application - Lotus Notes, if I recall - and does some referential and transactional work there. As he’s doing that, Lync goes off and he responds to that. He moves (9-12) into a 3rd ad-hoc application - one that he and another developer built in-house in Access - and references some other specific info there. As he turns around to (13) pull a printed direction sheet from the wall behind him, someone knocks on his cube for a short conversation. In short, Jim has a lot of data entry to do on screen. To do that task, he needs a lot of supplemental information from physical and digital sources. There’s a lot of input mode and focus switching. And like many offices, there are a lot of social creatures who create unintended distractions. The most interesting and valuable things happened off the screen.
- This is just a portion, maybe half, of the task analysis we pulled together from those sessions. Jim’s work is very important; millions of people rely on people like Jim because Jim represents…
- People who do the very important things designers never see, like setting up insurance, bank accounts, emergency vehicle service and even teaching first aid.
- These 22.5 million people work in what I’ll diplomatically call “uncertain” business environments, with people who may or may not be supportive. Insert your adjective here. Have you ever sympathized or empathized with an older worker as they deal with life? Maybe resentful of them because they represent barriers to your personal success? And they don’t necessarily get the right training, retraining or upskilling to set them up for success.
- Before we get into the work aspect, let’s talk about those who are staying connected, and the different meanings “staying connected” might have.
- Meet my mother-in-law Dolores. She’s about 84 now, and spent decades as an administrator for the AFL-CIO. I like to say “she’s 80-something going on 60-something” because she’s started to slow down very recently. She still goes to the mall, shopping, gets her hair done, drives from her home in NJ to her sister’s house in PA. About a year ago or so, she wanted a phone to have with her in case something happened while she was on the road. That’s pretty reasonable, so my wife and I did some research and found this Alcatel phone from Straight Talk. The phone has an industrial design and Android fork catering to older adults, so we got it. When we unboxed it, there’s this big yellow piece of paper which screams “WARNING!” instead of brand messaging, a black plastic slab with no affordances, a power plug, a credit card with something cut out, and a set of codes she needed to enter so she could use the phone. We laid it all out on her kitchen table and her first words were “You kids deal with this.” So we did. We turned the phone on, entered the codes, let it sit on the charger a while, and made a couple of test calls. We put our phone numbers in so Dolores could easily call us. We handed her the phone and talked her through the basics. She never overcame the initial barriers to access - those relating to understanding. She could see the phone, the buttons, the lines on the screen reading “Jennifer,” “Michael” and “Lolly.” She could see the small green icon which meant talk. She knew our phones would ring when she called. That didn’t overcome the intimidation and uncertainty of actually physically encountering this device. It sat on her shelf for the next year, in the charger, having never been used. We threw it out a few months ago.
- Another aspect of staying connected involves giving back and passing knowledge on, as we’ll see with Kathy. Kathy was a usability test participant for a major not-for-profit relaunch back in 2013. She’s a longtime first aid instructor, and helped us testing the course registration aspect of the new site. Kathy browsed for the right course and went to register. She was greeted with this error message, saying that the course she picked from the list was not available for registration. This started off as confusing, but she didn’t know how to overcome the error. She wasn’t clear on what to do next, and after throwing some phrases like “If this were a real situation, I’d be done with you all” at us, she gave up. 2 months later, Superstorm Sandy struck the east coast and people with Kathy’s first responder skills were vitally necessary.
- What we see with Kathy and Dolores is the first step towards exclusion from society, as Karyn Moffatt puts so nicely. The lines between the physical and virtual have become so blurred as to meaningfully not exist. Water is a utility, provided by physical and virtual technologies. So is electricity. And food. And information from critical events of the moment to the latest celebrity tabloid stories. All of these things keep us alive, vital, connected. Broadband is on the verge of being classified a utility, but can you imagine a world where the pipes are accessible but the water flowing forth isn’t? As we all know, turning the tap for water and flipping the switch for electricity costs money. And this leads us to…
- Those who want to stay employed and those who need to. These groups focus on the workplace. Some just want to stay employed, be productive and give back, but aren’t ready to retire. I think this will be my father, who’s always had a Puritan-esque work ethic. Others need the income or the benefits, and after the events of the last 6-8 years, are most at risk from the next big event to happen.
- They know this. They know that things are starting to get better and they feel more optimistic about living a viable retirement. But they’ve seen enough to know that they need to do whatever they can do to stay on the job, keeping that income and benefits. Having a willing set of users, if we were talking about a product, is great. Unfortunately, there’s more than one dancer in this tango.
- Remainder of Schambers’ quote: “Can we teach these older workers today’s skills, or can we afford to lose their knowledge base and let generations X and Y take over? That’s the solution of the younger crowd, which is a different type of bird and who, word has it, don’t give a hoot about the organization because they bring a different set of priorities and values to their employment.” The gist is that business culture and practices are changing, and the people coming into the workforce care about different things and expect to do their jobs differently than people my age or older do.
- For those in design, specifically UX, we face: The benefits and biases coming from a relatively young population of practitioners in a relatively young field Serving business who, with few exceptions, are iterations of well-entrenched legacy businesses And we work with clients and teams who want to push the envelope as much as possible, if not beyond
- Some of what we produce actually works against those who need it most. This is not intentional. I don’t think anyone of us wakes up in the morning saying “How can I possibly make someone’s life a little harder today?”
- I don’t think the solution is software-based, although there are great tools like Veronica, Bobby, Contrast Analyser (https://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastanalyser/) and more at the W3C and WebAIM sites. I don’t think it’s designing cooler interfaces based on the latest and greatest html/css/js frameworks It’s kind of hard to put on a product roadmap or backlog. You could probably try putting in “designing for older workers” but I’d expect that line item wouldn’t fly. And I don’t think there are new design methods or techniques per se. Sharron Rush and Knowbility, a great friend of this conference, have fantastic resources on accessibility and design. We know many of the people and consultancies advancing digital accessibility, but there are others like Age Smart NYC and AARP which have a lot of resources applicable to designing for the aging.
- For those of us in the room, some basic human stuff is what’s most appropriate.
- A few of you in here know me, and are probably surprised that I’m putting these up here. But being aware, understanding and empathetic goes a long way.
- Being aware, being mindful - that’s the first step. There’s being aware of how we interact with our coworkers and clients. There’s being aware of how we interact with the employees or customers who use what we produce. But there’s another side of awareness, the longer view.
- How many of you heard of this suit? The NFB files a class action lawsuit against Target in 2006 because target.com wasn’t accessible. The visually impaired couldn't buy things off the site. Decisions were made over the course of target.com’s strategy and implementation. Tradeoffs are always part of the equation. These tradeoffs were particularly costly, as Target ended up putting $6MM in a settlement fund and had to pay almost $4MM more in plaintiff awards and legal fees. This was a landmark ADA case.
- In 2013, an employee filed an ADA lawsuit against her employer because she wasn’t allowed the reasonable accommodation of having an oxygen tank with her at work. This case is still ongoing.
- There are many ADA lawsuits open or recently settled. You can read about them at http://adapacific.org/resources/lawsuits.php My question to you is a slippery slope - how long do you think it will be before we see those two lawsuits converge? Do you think we will see a situation where an employer requires the use of digital tools which one or more employees cannot use for physical or cognitive reasons, and the employer dismisses or devalues that employee, and the employee sues the employer under the ADA? Will that be a couple of years from now, 5 years from now? What are the decisions being made? Is your team assessing the business risk?
- Once we’re aware of our actions or inactions, understanding why - being curious - is next.
- Maybe you’re 40 now, but not quite as fast as you were 15 years ago. Maybe your memory’s a little fuzzier, or you feel a twinge when you move your thumb during a storm. Maybe you’re 20 now, and none of these really apply to you. But you’ve seen them in your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, your coworkers. Deloitte Research put together a great chart showing the high-level changes we face as we age.
- Let’s talk about vision for a second. We’re familiar with 20/20 vision, or 6/6 for our metric friends. 20/20 basically means unimpaired vision, discerning shapes and contours at 20’. 20/200 is the threshold for being legally blind. What a person with unimpaired vision can see at 200’, this person can see at 20’.
- This is my $70 Accessibility sniff test kit, which I’m passing around now. The goggles come from http://lowvisionsimulators.com and I bought the braces for $15 each at Walgreens last night. The goggles simulate 20/80 vision, and they’re big enough that they fit over most eyeglasses. Go on, try them on. Put one of the braces on the hand you usually use your phone with, and try using your phone. Your hand isn’t going to as comfortable, you won’t have the range of motion or strength you’re used to. Be careful - don’t drop your device and break the screen.
- While you're passing those around, let me tell you about the 2007 paper titled The Model Human Processor. It’s a meta-study of past information processing research applied to mobile devices across younger and older populations. Without diving into the science too much, the info processing breaks down into what people see, what they do and how they understand. Older people were found to take 1.5-2x longer to visually identify a target such as a text messaging app icon or the Send button. Doing - the act of moving the digit to the target and pressing it - took more time as well. And the understanding - the cognitive aspects like remembering a phone number or message to send - saw increased time and error rates because of reduced working memory time - that short term memory you use for remembering a phone number - and learning the interface, or “tool time” Basically, it’s the proverbial “death by a thousand paper cuts.” All these little things we’ll “fix in the next release” add up and add up.
- Anyone familiar with House of Cards? In the first season, Claire Underwood had to fire her long-time office manager. Shortly after that, Claire has this encounter at a coffee shop. Has that ever been us? Have any of us ever looked over the shoulder of a coworker who’s struggling with what we think is a simple task, only to butt in front of that person and just do it ourselves? I’ll be the first to admit that I have. Did the younger worker help or hinder? Was there any upskilling going on? How long do we think that older cashier is going to have a job, once the younger one says something to the manager? There’s no empathy there.
- We talk a lot about empathy for the people who buy and use the products we produce. But we fall back on contextualizing that empathy around digital applications, not the human-to-human interactions on the job.
- Let’s watch Dr. Ken Dychtwald talk about the human aspects of aging in his 2015 ASA Conference keynote, particularly the Financial and Social elements of the Deloitte chart. Dr. Dychtwald is the founder of AgeWave in San Francisco and President of the American Society on Aging. (After video) Does any of that sound familiar to you? I gotta say, that’s the most on point persona I’ve ever seen. I saw my mother go through that 20 years ago when her parents were dying and she was new at her bank. The woman from the video has her own children and parents to worry about. Let’s talk about that for a moment.
- Who here has children? Based on my quick mental math, this room has about 40 people in here right now and about half of you raised your hands. Congratulations on being statistically average! In 2012, the UN released a report showing that there are 49 dependents for every 100 people of working age. This is subtle but really important - the UN is defining a dependent as younger than 15yo and older than 65 - your kids AND your parents. Over the next 35 years or so, that number’s going to increase to 66 dependents per 100 people of working age. In other words, if you’ve ever felt resentment to coworkers who seemed to take extra personal time to take someone to the doctor, or the bank, or whatever - chances are that’s going to be you one day.
- And this brings us back to the workplace, and what we designers can start doing or incorporating Monday when we go back to work. Onboarding - are we designing for successful introduction, both digitally and at the person-to-person levels? Are we making our coworkers feel as “at home” with us as we want them to feel using our apps for the first time. Training - are we being patient with those who might know a lot about what they’re doing but not so much about the tools they’re using. Are we setting them up to succeed, or “sink or swim?” Retaining - It can be incredibly time consuming to replace info workers. Take a look at the job requisitions and think about the number of interviews which go into hiring. That’s time and money spent on wild goose chases, lost productivity, longer time to market and on and on. Knowledge Transfer - This is the hardest to quantify, but it’s another thing we see every day. Ever say “oh yeah, you need to see Mary about that. She knows everything about it.”? Some call it “wetware,” others “tribal knowledge.” Either way, there’s always one go-to person in the office. And when that person leaves, willingly or unwillingly, a lot of that knowledge is lost. It’s even worse when there are systems in place, like Jive or Sharepoint, which could be used to transfer that knowledge but for whatever reason, doesn’t get used.
- I have one last story and it hits on onboarding, training, retaining and knowledge transfer. Meet my father Randy. Dad was a car mechanic for over 40 years until he had a heart attack back in ’08. After that, the physical effort of being a mechanic was too much. Ever spend time in an auto shop? They’re basically big concrete and metal boxes with crappy ventilation and a tendency to get very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. It’s physically demanding, even aside from all the heavy lifting and overhead working they’re doing. There’s a company in NJ near their home. Think of it like AAA but for corporate and commercial fleets, everything from company cars to tractor trailers to freight railroad. My father’s job is like when you call AAA - you’re in trouble, need roadside assistance, and call for help. Now this company has a lot of people like my father working there. They were mechanics, service managers back in the day and today they’re using all that experience to get people out of trouble. So it’s kind of important, but I’m willing to bet that you don’t think of the AAA dispatcher until you get a flat and need a tow. About a year or 2 ago, he’s telling me about these 2 guys who worked with him for a few days and asked how he did his job. He’s basically describing a contextual inquiry with these two people, and how they’re really excited to make his apps easier to use. A few months later, he told me what happened. “They totally screwed the system up. Now we have our managers pulling us into meetings about our productivity. Everyone’s missing their quota, going over time on calls. This used to be really easy, now we have to remember all these codes and put them in in the right order. But the right order in the system isn’t the right order we need, know what I mean?” Yes, he has seen coworkers get in trouble with this. If he and his peers don’t meet productivity quotas, penalties are brought.
- As he’s telling me this, all I can think of is that scene from Duck Dodgers and the way to Planet X. All these workflows changed. Training was very basic. The business didn’t account for change like this, and kept the old quota system in place even though basic tasks took longer to do. And since the entire support platform changed — workflow did not match intent, inflexible structure, Cooper’s “dumb system” from Inmates, taxonomy disconnected from practicality — his coworkers’ livelihoods were put at risk.
- To wrap up and connect the dots, there’s a looming workforce crisis happening over the next couple of decades. Things are fine now but as the freelance economy gains strength and people retire or are “counseled out” of work, we start to see today’s comfortable surplus shrink to an uncomfortable level.
- When we take that labor shortage, and combine it with the differences between the older workers’ deep knowledge but lower digital skills and the younger workers’ higher digital skills but lesser business history, and the perceived cultural differences between generations of workers, the workforce crisis makes a lot more sense. The people who may best help us avert it are the very ones we’re inadvertently excluding from society. The punchline to all this is…
- I started 1st grade in 1978
- The following year, my school bought around 6 or 8 Commodore PETs and my parents paid extra for me to learn them and use them.
- Remember when banks used to give people toasters when they took out a loan? In 1982, my parents’ bank gave them a Timex Sinclair 1000. We bought the 64k upgrade module. I don’t remember how much it cost. This was followed by a Commodore 64, Commodore 128, and an AST 486DX/66.
- In 1991, back in my pre-Law days, I interned for a NJ State Senator. When I started, they were getting rid of the Wang terminals in favor of Word Perfect. Ah, the joys of teaching my coworkers Copy/Paste and mail merge.
- Now let’s look at the last 15 years. Segway in 2000 - The future of personal transportation? No. But it’s great for tourist groups, law enforcement and getting around warehouses. Prius in 2001 - started reducing our reliance on gasoline and brought big touchscreen UIs into the mainstream. Youtube in 2005 - gave our generation a voice and platform unlike any other time. iPhone in 2007 - the most intimately personal connection to technology. 23andMe’s genotyping kit in 2008 - maybe more than you wanted to know, but you didn’t have to spend thousands to learn it Mistry’s Sixth Sense in 2009 - Hololens or Glass years before they existed. And it’s real. Watch Pranav Mistry’s TED talk, by the way. Google Glass 2012 - It’s making a comeback in medicine and the enterprise. Like the Segway, don’t count it out. Google’s glucose measuring contacts in 2014 - The interface for measuring blood glucose is still pricking your finger for blood. No more.
- Looking back, it’s absolutely amazing how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. But today’s generation of designers don’t know a world where they’re excluded not because of a11y, but access to technology. Access in terms of availability, affordability, understanding, seeing the value. They won’t know a world where they’re denied opportunity for lack of experience, such as when I was growing up and maybe many of you too. They won’t know the world my parents, and Jim, and Kathy and the 22.5 million other people created because those are the people seen as the cause of the problem.
- How is this about us? We’re 20, 30, 40 years away from being one of those 22.5 million. When we assume a certain amount of digital literacy in an older worker, when we give them the short shrift in training and onboarding, when we treat them differently because of their age - we’re treating reflections of our future selves. I’m 42. I don’t know what the world will look like when I’m 62. I do know that my present self should not be the enemy of my future self. I wouldn’t want to create a world in which I cannot live and be a good member of society. Chances are, you’re not going to build a startup with a billion dollar valuation, so you may need to work. Look at the aging workforce as the “future you.” Treat them as you want to be treated. Give them the tools and support you yourself would want. Be aware. Understand. Empathy is human, not digital. Be good.