Important Italics

In Jeff Johnson and Kate Finn’s “Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population,” the authors note it’s important “to think in terms of tendencies and generalities instead of absolutes.”

Early on, they italicize words such as “tend (to),” “some,” and “often” to make that point. There are phrases such as “poor usability tends to affect older adults more often,” and “older study participants tend to have better vocabularies.”

They stop the italicizing after Chapter 1, but they don’t stop being insightful.

“Throughout this book,” they point out, “we emphasize that the number and degree of individual differences increases with age.”