Yet, ironically, the person who designed it was reported to have said that it was changed from the previous approach to help aged people. Most aged people do not progress through the form the same way younger people do. Our testing has shown that they skim the form looking for items they expect to find, often the items they think are most important. Often their poor eyesight plays an important part in this behavior. They find it very tiring and time consuming to read everything.
Aged people have a serious problem with short-term memory loss.
Even if they had read the whole form, it is likely that many would not have remembered the location of all items. Aged people have had a whole lifetime of bad experiences in form filling. They just expect every form to be bad. The bad experience mentioned above frequently leads to the idea that a form, by definition, must be hard to use. We found repeatedly that older people had an intense fear of forms.