The work aims to improve the degree of acceptance and use of APP products by the elderly through the design of elderly-oriented visual symbols in the APP interface, so as to improve the interactive experience of elderly users. First of all, the visual cognitive characteristics of the elderly and their difficulties in using APP products were investigated, interviewed and analyzed. Next, based on the visual symbol theory, the relationship among the visual symbols, the visual cognition and the needs of the elderly was further studied, and the visual symbol system in the APP interface was constructed from semantics, syntactic structure, context and pragmatics. Finally, the APP elderly-oriented coding strategy was proposed based on the visual symbol theory, and combined with the behavioral characteristics of elderly users, the design practice of news APP products was carried out. An elderly-oriented APP coding strategy based on visual symbol theory was proposed and the elderly-oriented design practice of news APP was carried out, which effectively reduced the cognitive dilemma of elderly users. The proposed method improves the cognitive efficiency of elderly users to visual symbols in the interface, and provides reference for the elderly-oriented design of APP products.