Elderly user evaluation of mobile touchscreen interactions

  • Authors:

  • Masatomo Kobayashi;Atsushi Hiyama;Takahiro Miura;Chieko Asakawa;Michitaka Hirose;Tohru Ifukube

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM Research - Tokyo, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa, Japan;Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;IBM Research - Tokyo, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa, Japan;Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Institute of Gerontology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • INTERACT'11 Proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Smartphones with touchscreen-based interfaces are increasingly used by non-technical groups including the elderly. However, application developers have little understanding of how senior users interact with their products and of how to design senior-friendly interfaces. As an initial study to assess standard mobile touchscreen interfaces for the elderly, we conducted performance measurements and observational evaluations of 20 elderly participants. The tasks included performing basic gestures such as taps, drags, and pinching motions and using basic interactive components such as software keyboards and photo viewers. We found that mobile touchscreens were generally easy for the elderly to use and a week's experience generally improved their proficiency. However, careful observations identified several typical problems that should be addressed in future interfaces. We discuss the implications of our experiments, seeking to provide informal guidelines for application developers to design better interfaces for elderly people.