Most of their buyers are over 55. The brief was mobile-first.

In a workshop last week the owner of a home and living brand I look after said something that reframed the whole project. Roughly four out of five of their buyers are over 55.

Nobody in the room was surprised. The products help people get in and out of bed more easily; the purchase is usually triggered by a back, a hip, a recovery, a new set of limits. The customer is old on purpose. That is the market.

The previous design brief had been written mobile-first, and it had landed badly. Not because mobile-first is wrong — it is a sound discipline and I have used it for years — but because a brief is not a discipline. A brief is a set of decisions about a specific person, and this one had quietly optimised for the wrong body.

What mobile-first smuggles in

Thumb-driven navigation. One long scrolling column. Text laid over imagery. Low-contrast greys because they photograph well. Small targets, because a young hand is accurate. Copy as caption rather than copy as explanation. None of those are stated in the brief; they arrive with it.

Now put the actual buyer in front of it. Presbyopic eyes, reduced contrast sensitivity, less accurate fine motor control, and a strong preference for reading before clicking. Nielsen Norman Group has been running usability studies with people over 65 for two decades, and their finding is consistently uncomfortable: on the same sites, older users are substantially slower — not because they are confused, but because the interface is built for someone else.

What this audience actually needs is unglamorous. Higher contrast — treat the 4.5:1 accessibility floor as a floor, not a target. Bigger targets. Text under the image rather than on it. Calm instead of urgency. And desktop designed in parallel rather than derived, because a lot of this cohort buys on a laptop at a kitchen table, frequently with an adult child sitting beside them. That second person is a decision-maker nobody had designed for at all.

Mobile-first is a discipline. It is not a demographic.

Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim make the point better than I can in Blue Ocean Shift: go and "observe existing buyers in their professional environments or homes", documenting the difficulties they hit across the whole experience, not the bit you own. For a product whose entire reason to exist is how somebody's home works, doing that from a laptop is negligence dressed as research.

Then I audited what was actually live

Three country sites, byte-identical clones of one hand-built template. The findings arranged themselves into a pattern faster than I expected.

The homepages declare video structured data for four videos and surface exactly one — and two of the four declared videos are in a language that market does not speak. A sister site serves a single thirty-megabyte hero video to every device: no poster frame, no preload hint, no mobile variant, the same full-resolution file going to a phone on mobile data. That is the entire "the site feels slow" complaint, explained in one line, and it is the thing not to repeat when the brief asks for more video.

Each market has four use-case pillar pages and ninety-odd articles live. None of them are linked from the homepage. That is the same failure I found when forty-six live ads had nowhere to land, only in reverse: the destination exists and nothing points at it.

Trust is text-only across all three. No certification marks, no country-of-origin badge, no payment icons, no review widget, no page saying who is behind the company. For a buyer over 70 spending four figures on a health-adjacent product from a website they have never heard of, that is the whole decision.

The reframe that made the brief writable

None of this is a design problem. It is one problem wearing several costumes: the sites were built as campaign landing surfaces and are now being asked to behave like a shop.

A campaign surface has one job — receive a click, take an action. A shop has to survive being browsed by somebody who is going to think about it for three weeks, come back twice, and show it to their daughter. Video at the top of a page is not a video project. It is the first thirty seconds of a stranger deciding whether this company is real.

Which turns out to be the same thing the audience was telling us all along. Calmer. Clearer. Slower. Say who you are.

Sources & further reading

External
Nielsen Norman Group: usability for older adults — challenges and changes
NN/g: UX design for seniors — two decades of usability studies
WCAG 2.2: understanding minimum contrast
European Commission: unfair commercial practices law, including the rules on consumer reviews
web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint, and why a hero video decides it

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