How Do I Bridge A Generation Gap?

Bearsong · 03-27-2007, 08:38 AM

We are going to do a massive overhaul on our member-oriented Web sites. We have an interesting situation.

Most of our visitors are the fearless leaders and secretaries from our member companies. They are older baby-boomers in rural areas who enjoy simplified and easy to use sites. (Fast mouse-overs are hard on older hands, no longer as adept at finesse as they once were.)

However, we have a core of staff and some employees of these companies who are on the high-tech end of life. They use and work with the bells and whistles easily. They are now coming to the sites more often as we are offering more for their use as well as beloved Fearless Leaders mentioned above.

We need to accommodate both types of users as best as possible.

The only idea I have so far is offer pop-up menus/fly-outs with a link that disables the fly out. It accommodates both types of users nicely.

Anyone else have other ideas on how to get to a comfortable medium for all? I'm open to ideas on graphics. architecture, layout, bells n whistles and good old fashioned sweat n hard work...

Thanks ahead of time!

damien_ls · 03-27-2007, 03:43 PM

Can you give some examples of:
the websites you're looking at overhauling;
the kind of UI one group prefer, and the kind of UI for the other?

Bearsong · 03-28-2007, 10:59 AM

Funny you should ask that.

We've just begun the CSI investigation which is why I posted what is probably appearing to be a vague question. We've not formally asked members yet but have begun canvasing staff and our boards.

I think what I am trying to find is something along the lines of accessibility ideas oriented more to preferences instead of physical needs.

Most of our sites offer a lot of info for members usually via PDF files and research papers. Financial activity is heavy as we require all shopping, event registrations and insurance transactions to be done online for security reasons.

www.ntca.org
www.frs.org
www.ntcateco.org

(There are others but these will be the ring-leaders.)

And that's actually about all members can do right now. We'll have the ability and resources to create pretty much whatever we want, along with enough time to do it. The concern is while building a more modern 'world' offering members more interactivity and features, how do we ensure we don't "freak out" the boomers so used to a simplified site?

(I already refused the mirror sites idea unless fearless leader can clone me to handle it all. Hah!)

... now wondering if I actually answered your question.....

Taltos · 03-29-2007, 05:03 PM

Multiple style sheets? An option to select which one. If the new site is pretty much fully CSS, you can change from lots of dropdown and flyout menus to more static menu presentations from a different CSS. Still a good bit of maintenance in this but less than 2 different sites.

Bearsong · 03-30-2007, 02:47 PM

My gods. That is too obvious. I'd never have thought of it!

I knew I'd love this forum... Thanks!