Why do product builders consistently ignore the elderly and the young?

We do both at our peril...

Over 7 years ago, I gave a talk to a pretty large group on consumers trends we’d need to be aware of to do our jobs well. It was one of my more fun talks to put together.

I focussed on a few things, but the 2 things I ended with for that product was showing that a lot of their users were very young and also very old - and their needs and behaviors diverged significantly from the “user” that team was building for. In fact, their particular behaviors and needs were mostly (and often still are) ignored. Both segments were also going to grow significantly over the next couple of years - and that parts of the product weren't really built for them.

But the most visceral example of this for me came much earlier - about ~14 years ago when the then CEO of YouTube, Salar Kamangar, in a talk at YouTube asked the audience of employees, how many of them were under 25 (there were quite a few), under 20 (a couple of interns kept their hands up), then under 15 (no hands and silence) and he then said “So remember, when we make product decisions most of our users aren’t represented in this room, and we need to find a way to represent them.”

I find this is really hard for people to do well. Catering to an older audience is even harder - even as that segment grows in importance and number in a large part of the world.

Between the two segments - for this purpose let’s say under 20 and over 60 - it can (sometimes) be most of your users, but we don’t design for them. They put up or learn what we’ve built. Even for teams that are good at building a global product and know to think about language, culture etc., age can be a blind spot.

The surprising part is very often optimizing on the margins for one of these segments can often lead you to build a better product overall.

I’m thinking more about this as I talk about AI both with my kids and their friends (all in elementary school) and my mom and other elderly relatives. As always, the people that might benefit most from the technology - and together are a near majority of users globally - will likely benefit last if we aren’t more deliberate in how we think about things.