Tuesday 1 April 2008

I Must Be Getting Old

According to recent research by Jakob Neilsen, older web users take longer to complete web tasks. In fact, he's actually calculated a decline of 0.8% per year for every year you get older after the age of 25.

He says "The human aging process starts around age 25 and causes erosion of cognitive resources, loss of visual acuity, degraded reaction times, and reduced dexterity. People need more time for the same mental operations; they have less memory capacity and take longer to process the same perceptual input."

That makes me feel really great as I approach my 39th birthday. Ouch.

So, am I 8% slower than I was 10 years ago? Wow, I wonder if that's true?

Well, I just know I'm faster overall. Maybe my brain is slower, but I am sure that 10 years of internet usage have brought massive gains from experience. Slow brain maybe, but a very efficient one!

See Middle-Aged Users' Declining Web Performance for the full article.

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