• The foraging paradigm can be applied in research on Multi-List Recommender Interfaces (MLRIs). • Older users find fewer products that match their preferences in MLRIs than younger ones. • The decreased performance of older users in MLRIs is mediated by their reduced exploration, that is inability to switch to new carousels at the right time. • A digital nudge that is activated when a user browses a carousel without interacting with the products on that carousel improves the performance of both older and younger users in MLRIs. User interfaces composed of multiple carousels (Multi-List Recommender Interfaces, MLRIs) are today’s standard for recommender systems used in e-commerce and streaming or music platforms. User behavior in such systems can be compared to foraging, a research paradigm used in the natural sciences and psychology. Research on foraging points out several hypotheses that can apply to MLRI users. Results from the psychology of aging point out possible limitations of older adults in the use of MLRIs. We verify this hypothesis in an experiment that measures users’ objective performance ( N = 441). The experiment results confirm that older users are less effective in a task of searching for products in a MLRI interface. We propose an improvement of the carousel interface through a digital nudge that aims to prompt a user to leave a carousel that does not contain items matching the user’s preferences, and switch to another carousel. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed digital nudge in increasing the performance of both older and younger users.