UX across the Generations…

We put forward the question on a recent webinar focussed on Millennials as to whether there were any similarities in user behaviour across all the generation groups – Boomlets, Millennials, Generation X and Baby Boomers* – once those born in those generations had reached a certain age. We asked the question because we find that it’s important to know who a client company identifies as the audiences for its product. Also, to understand whether a product’s full range of potential users will behave the same way as any main audience. This is also another good reason for it being important to gather personas – to understand the range of potential users.

Our hypothesis was that it is likely that even if there are characteristic behavioural facets around a new emergent generation, that it is likely that the generation’s behavioural patterns homogenise as they age so that there is a pattern of behaviours that span all generations regardless of those initial characteristics. Or put as simply as we can, does access to technological innovation change the natural course of a generation’s life development and the pressures and changes physiologically or in responsibility that life development brings? Is there some synchronicity of how to approach users of a particular age – let’s say 40 and over – to produce a successful digital product?

To give an illustration, a commercial product may be designed and marketed with a particular user in mind, with the focus on this particular user having been guided by a perception that they are likely to be from a younger group because the product itself is seen as new and innovative. This can happen easily where, for example, client stakeholders are used as primary sources for identifying personas rather than conducting real-life research. However, in actuality, the users that have the purchasing power for the product may be significantly older than those users being focussed on and so the product fails. We have seen this a few times – especially in participating in testing a financial service product where the emphasis was very much on what was technologically possible but with little consideration of the realities of how customers might really access the service on a day-to-day basis and who those customers might be.

*We were thinking about the years that spanned the Mature/Silents and GI Generations too.