Is it harder for older people to create and track passwords than younger people? Maybe not. But there could be a difference in the way the two groups deal with the issues. A research study comparing a group of older people with a group of younger people provided surprising results. Older people had no problem creating and remembering passwords because they devised their own memory strategies.
The most reported concerns were the same for both age groups. They were remembering passwords, the security of passwords and systems, making strong passwords, and requirements being too complex. Older people were more concerned about being locked out of their accounts due to forgetting the password.
Some of the simple strategies for password creation by younger people resulted in less secure passwords. But older people had more difficulty in creating strong passwords.
Length and strength
The first surprising result was that on password length, older participants reported having little difficulty with this aspect of password creation, while young participants had considerable difficulty. However, on a follow-up opened ended question, many more older people elaborated on their difficulties, which included the use of special symbols and difficult making strong passwords.
On the other hand, young participants most often expressed difficulty in re-using previous passwords. These findings are generally in line with results from others that older people were using familiar words and phrases for passwords. Perhaps this avoided the complexity of combinations of characters, numbers and symbols.
The title of the article is, Password Authentication for Older People: Problems, Behaviours and Strategies. An interesting look at assumptions about younger and older people and their abilities with internet technology.
From the abstract
Many online services require a secure account, usually password protected. Creating and tracking these accounts and passwords is difficult for everyone. This is a vitally important issue as online accounts now give access to many healthcare, financial and support services.
This study used an online questionnaire to investigate the behaviours, problems, and strategies for creating and using password-protected online accounts with a sample of 75 older UK participants (aged 65 to 89). They were compared with a similar sample of young UK participants (aged 18 to 30).
The results were surprising with unexpected differences between the groups, but many similarities. For example, older participants had no difficulties creating passwords of the right length, whereas young participants had difficulties in that task.
Older participants had many more complex strategies for creating and remembering passwords. Young participants relied more on re-using old passwords with small changes which then probably caused difficulties remembering them. These results suggest we need to rethink the approach to better supporting older people in password creation and use, taking a more universal design approach, supporting all users with a range of options.