Introduction to Volume 18, Issue 2

Our February 2023 essay is “Gran Got Tech: Inclusivity and Older Adults” by Robert M. Schumacher.  He describes issues that older adults have with using current digital technologies (the digital divide), why user experience researchers and designers should care, and what might be done.

In addition to the essay, this issue includes two research papers, one on low-tech user experience and one comparing three standardized UX questionnaires.

The first article is “The User Experience of Low-techs: From User Problems to Design Principles,” by Clément Colin and Antoine Martin. Many UX researchers and designers work on high technology problems and solutions, but UX principles can also be applied to low tech. Colin and Martin define low-techs and, from a survey of 396 participants, derive 14 primary UX issues and seven corresponding design principles for low-techs.

The second article is “A Comparison of SUS, UMUX-LITE, and UEQ-S,” by Martin Schrepp, Jessica Kollmorgen, and Jörg Thomaschewski. They investigated the content and measurement properties of common (SUS) and increasingly common (UMUX-LITE and UEQ-S) standardized UX questionnaires.