My grandmother is in her late 70s and she loves the internet. We talk on AIM, we email, and recently she started getting into some interesting web apps around the internets -- specifically Geni. But are developers doing anything to help seniors out in order to better capture that market?

Nana and Geni as a Case Study

Seniors have some decent spending power and they're willing to give up some change in order to make their lives easier. Surely there are some sites out there that might fill this niche. I think Geni and other genealogy sites are a good example of that. Old people love that stuff.

My grandmother and her sister were already working on genealogy projects using tried and true pencil/paper systems. When I explain to her how putting all this information they had gathered into a database where it could edited and changed easily, she was in love. This would have been impossible, though, if Geni wasn't very easy to use and employed simple concepts when setting out to solve problems.

Girl boxes are pink and boy boxes are blue. It sounds simple, duh, and it is. It's not rocket surgery or brain science, it's just simplest of concepts that might be overlooked from a developer perspective. Further digging shows how hassle-free adding a new person to the tree is, or checking up on family, or adding photos.

The Senior Market

The senior internet market is actually (surprisingly, perhaps) very healthy.

In 2006, there were 17.6 million Internet users in the US ages 62 and older, according to eMarketer. By 2011 that number will increase to 25.4 million. A 7.6% average annual growth rate is not too shabby -- especially when you consider that's more than twice the 3.1% growth rate eMarketer forecasts for the entire US Internet population.

This may have something to do with seniors today enjoying better health, longer and more active lives, greater free time and higher discretionary income than past generations.

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