How Can We Improve the Interaction of Older Users With Devices?

Abstract

Nowadays, world society lives in the information age where technology has made significant advances. This evolution did not simultaneously follow the aging population, which currently can have physical and cognitive difficulties interacting with these devices. This paper aims to analyze how we can enhance older users' experience with portable electronic devices to make them more accessible and user-friendly for this group of people. We carried out assessments with 25 older adults, aged between 60 and 76, who participated in an introductory informatics course. The methodology used were observation, interview, and the application of a questionnaire. After three consecutive months of in-person meetings, we analyzed the data, detecting the senior users' main difficulties during the interaction with devices. Among the results obtained in this work, most of the older users thought it was challenging to find and configure the settings and were afraid to break the device, and some had difficulties with the keyboard, the small font size, and the touchscreen. We show all our findings with more details and suggest how we can improve older users' interaction with devices, reinforcing how accessibility is essential. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Seniors; • Hardware → Communication hardware, interfaces and storage; • Human-centered computing → Accessibility design and evaluation methods