Selling to the Older Generation Online

Matthew Curry is head of new media at Wiltshire Farm Foods, a firm that predominantly sells to the older generation. And by older, we’re talking 80+, rather than 55+. As you might imagine, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Matthew explains here why usability and testing matters so much, and why you shouldn’t believe everything they tell you about the scroll bar.

- Tell us a bit more about what you do, and why it’s different to the average e-commerce firm?

Wiltshire Farm Foods is a very grey brand. I’m sure most Econsultancy readers will have never heard of us, however, if they spoke to their grandparents, they would certainly recognise the name. We’re a company that provides a range of frozen ready meals, hand delivered, specifically created for an elderly audience. Among other things, I control the Wiltshire Farm Foods website. You’d think there wouldn’t be much call for that sort of thing given the nature of the business, but after running it for nearly 10 years now, there definitely is.

The website now represents around one fifth of the entire business, something we’d never have even imagined when we started out. We originally assumed it would be what we call “influencers” ordering online on behalf of their parents, and initially it was, but now around 60% of our web visitors are consumers ordering for themselves.

- There must be all kinds of challenges associated with creating a usable and accessible website specifically for older people?

My oldest customer is 103. It sure was fun talking them through how to register for Mastercard Securecode, back in the bad old days when the banks left it up to us to explain the process to their customers. It’s not the most user-friendly process at the best of times.

A good fraction of my customers also have either motor or visual impairment, which again brings some unique challenges. When you’re on the phone to a customer (I try to speak to as many customers as I can), they tell you they are blind and you ask them to turn up their speakers so you can hear what the website is saying to them, it’s incredibly humbling. So as you can expect, usability is everything to me.

My favourite experience was visiting website users in their homes, it’s a different world to a usability lab, one where sticky notes on the screen (with a password written on, of course) can obscure a key navigational element. We tend to throw every usability testing trick in the book at the site. Eye-tracking however, I’ve never held much belief in. It doesn’t always work, and we found, doesn’t work at all when your test subject has a glass eye.

One astounding thing we found, was that as laptops and netbooks are the most affordable and simple entry-level machines, our test subjects were more familiar with trackpads than mice. So yes, we spend an awful lot of time focusing on usability, helped by Headscape (a usability-focused design and development agency), but it pays off in our conversion rate.

Associated Link: More: Q&A: Matthew Curry on selling to older folks online

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