Important But Invisible

What the Aging Workforce Needs From DesignImportant But Invisible

We are problem solvers.

I come to you with a challenge.

Meet my mother, Donna. Shes 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, shes still at that bank where she handles new customer accounts, supports those accountholders and manages the banks electronic banking systems. If theres a problem with the ATMs or the online banking platform, shes the go-to person. Thats a role shes had for the last 5-6 years. Shes 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 dogs toy. Well work on the spell check and autocorrect.

While she manages her banks 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.

22.5 million people working past retirement age in US

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.

Lifespan has increased by 15 years in the last 50 years 68.2195079.1201583.862050

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 yrs1980 - 73.7 yrs2015 - 79.1 yrs2025 - 80.5 yrs2050 - 83.86 yrs

They stay working for 3 reasons

But they stay in the workforce for 3 basic reasons.

productive, contributing members of society

need

stay connected

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, theres about 1/3 who work. Thats what they do. They dont necessarily need the money or the benefits, but they do feel the need to be productive and contributing.

Lastly, theres the 1/3, or 7.5 million, who need the money and/or the benefits.

What are they doing?

Theyre doing some pretty important things. Theyre, like my mother, working in consumer banking. Theyre 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.

The things we don't think about or take for granted

In other words, theyre doing things we dont really think about, we rarely - if ever - see, or we just take for granted.

123-6789-1213

Meet Jim(Jim is real. This is not a real photo of him.)

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 clients 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. Its 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 customers 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 hes 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. Theres 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. Jims work is very important; millions of people rely on people like Jim because Jim represents

Important things many designers never see.

People who do the very important things designers never see, like setting up insurance, bank accounts, emergency vehicle service and even teaching first aid.

22.5 million peopleworking in an uncertain business environment with[insert adjective here] coworkers usingtools and apps with little to no support or training.

These 22.5 million people work in what Ill 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 dont necessarily get the right training, retraining or upskilling to set them up for success.

staying connectedhttp://www.fauquiernow.com/index.php/fauquier_news/article/faces-of-fauquier-walmart-cashier-loves-to-play-violin

Before we get into the work aspect, lets talk about those who are staying connected, and the different meanings staying connected might have.

Meet my mother-in-law Dolores. Shes about 84 now, and spent decades as an administrator for the AFL-CIO. I like to say shes 80-something going on 60-something because shes 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 sisters 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. Thats 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, theres 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 didnt 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 well see with Kathy.

Kathy was a usability test participant for a major not-for-profit relaunch back in 2013. Shes 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 didnt know how to overcome the error. She wasnt clear on what to do next, and after throwing some phrases like If this were a real situation, Id be done with you all at us, she gave up.

2 months later, Superstorm Sandy struck the east coast and people with Kathys first responder skills were vitally necessary.

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

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 isnt?

As we all know, turning the tap for water and flipping the switch for electricity costs money. And this leads us to

productive, contributing members of society

need

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 arent ready to retire. I think this will be my father, whos 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.

Older adults in a need position are doing whatever they can to stay employed.

They know this. They know that things are starting to get better and they feel more optimistic about living a viable retirement. But theyve 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, theres more than one dancer in this tango.

But whats 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

Remainder of Schambers quote: Can we teach these older workers todays skills, or can we afford to lose their knowledge base and let generations X and Y take over? Thats the solution of the younger crowd, which is a different type of bird and who, word has it, dont 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.

Young industry.Legacy businesses.Clients and teams who want to push the envelope.

For those in design, specifically UX, we face:The benefits and biases coming from a relatively young population of practitioners in a relatively young fieldServing business who, with few exceptions, are iterations of well-entrenched legacy businessesAnd we work with clients and teams who want to push the envelope as much as possible, if not beyond

It's not intentional. None of us really mean to make things harder

Some of what we produce actually works against those who need it most. This is not intentional. I dont think anyone of us wakes up in the morning saying How can I possibly make someones life a little harder today?

So what can we do?

Not softwareNot cooler interfacesNot backlogged or roadmapped.Not new design methods

I dont 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 dont think its designing cooler interfaces based on the latest and greatest html/css/js frameworks

Its kind of hard to put on a product roadmap or backlog. You could probably try putting in designing for older workers but Id expect that line item wouldnt fly.

And I dont 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.

Some basic human stuff

For those of us in the room, some basic human stuff is whats most appropriate.

AwarenessUnderstandingEmpathy

A few of you in here know me, and are probably surprised that Im putting these up here. But being aware, understanding and empathetic goes a long way.

Being aware of our actions

Being aware, being mindful - thats the first step. Theres being aware of how we interact with our coworkers and clients. Theres being aware of how we interact with the employees or customers who use what we produce.

But theres another side of awareness, the longer view.

NFB v. Target$6MM settlement$3.8MM award

How many of you heard of this suit? The NFB files a class action lawsuit against Target in 2006 because target.com wasnt accessible. The visually impaired couldn't buy things off the site.

Decisions were made over the course of target.coms 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 wasnt allowed the reasonable accommodation of having an oxygen tank with her at work. This case is still ongoing.

Colvin v. Paddle Wheel InnFiled 2013

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?

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?

Understand what happens as we age.

Once were aware of our actions or inactions, understanding why - being curious - is next.

Source: Deloitte Research

Maybe youre 40 now, but not quite as fast as you were 15 years ago. Maybe your memorys a little fuzzier, or you feel a twinge when you move your thumb during a storm.

Maybe youre 20 now, and none of these really apply to you. But youve 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.

20/200Legally Blind

20/20Unimpairedhttp://www.eyecare-duxton.com/eyecare-professionals.html

Lets talk about vision for a second. Were 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 Im 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 theyre 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 isnt going to as comfortable, you wont have the range of motion or strength youre used to. Be careful - dont drop your device and break the screen.

Understanding200% longer to process informationDoing25%-200% more time to acquire and act1.5-2x longer to visually identify targetSeeing2007 - The Model Human Processor37

While you're passing those around, let me tell you about the 2007 paper titled The Model Human Processor. Its 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, its the proverbial death by a thousand paper cuts. All these little things well 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 whos struggling with what we think is a simple task, only to butt in front of that person and just do it ourselves? Ill 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? Theres no empathy there.

Practice empathy on the job

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.

Lets 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, thats the most on point persona Ive 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. Lets 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 numbers going to increase to 66 dependents per 100 people of working age.

In other words, if youve 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 thats going to be you one day.

OnboardingTrainingRetainingKnowledge Transfer

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 theyre doing but not so much about the tools theyre 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. Thats 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 its 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, theres always one go-to person in the office. And when that person leaves, willingly or unwillingly, a lot of that knowledge is lost. Its even worse when there are systems in place, like Jive or Sharepoint, which could be used to transfer that knowledge but for whatever reason, doesnt 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? Theyre 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. Its physically demanding, even aside from all the heavy lifting and overhead working theyre doing.

Theres 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 fathers job is like when you call AAA - youre 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 theyre using all that experience to get people out of trouble. So its kind of important, but Im willing to bet that you dont think of the AAA dispatcher until you get a flat and need a tow.

About a year or 2 ago, hes telling me about these 2 guys who worked with him for a few days and asked how he did his job. Hes basically describing a contextual inquiry with these two people, and how theyre 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. Everyones 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 isnt the right order we need, know what I mean? Yes, he has seen coworkers get in trouble with this. If he and his peers dont meet productivity quotas, penalties are brought.

Because the system changed the workflows,coworkers ran into trouble,quotas werent met,and some almost lost their jobs.

As hes 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 didnt 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, Coopers dumb system from Inmates, taxonomy disconnected from practicality his coworkers livelihoods were put at risk.

To wrap up and connect the dots, theres 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 todays comfortable surplus shrink to an uncomfortable level.

3 Workforce Factors

When we take that labor shortage, and combine it withthe differences between the older workers deep knowledge but lower digital skills and the younger workers higher digital skills but lesser business history, andthe 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 were inadvertently excluding from society.

The punchline to all this is

This is really about us

1978

I started 1st grade in 1978

10 PRINT 197920 GOTO 10

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.

10 PRINT 198220 GOTO 10http://www.oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html

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 dont remember how much it cost.

This was followed by a Commodore 64, Commodore 128, and an AST 486DX/66.

~1991https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/5x-dos

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.

20002001200520072008200920122014

Now lets look at the last 15 years.

Segway in 2000 - The future of personal transportation? No. But its 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. 23andMes genotyping kit in 2008 - maybe more than you wanted to know, but you didnt have to spend thousands to learn itMistrys Sixth Sense in 2009 - Hololens or Glass years before they existed. And its real. Watch Pranav Mistrys TED talk, by the way.Google Glass 2012 - Its making a comeback in medicine and the enterprise. Like the Segway, dont count it out.Googles glucose measuring contacts in 2014 - The interface for measuring blood glucose is still pricking your finger for blood. No more.

1979 1991 2000-2015

Looking back, its absolutely amazing how far weve come in such a short period of time. But todays generation of designers dont know a world where theyre excluded not because of a11y, but access to technology. Access in terms of availability, affordability, understanding, seeing the value.

They wont know a world where theyre denied opportunity for lack of experience, such as when I was growing up and maybe many of you too.

They wont 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.

This is really about us

How is this about us? Were 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 - were treating reflections of our future selves.

Im 42. I dont know what the world will look like when Im 62. I do know that my present self should not be the enemy of my future self. I wouldnt want to create a world in which I cannot live and be a good member of society.

Chances are, youre 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.

@mcarvinhttp://linkedin.com/in/mcarvinhttp://bracketux.commichael@bracketux.com856-952-0001Thank you.