It's on the Cards: Designing Technology Instructions for People Living with Dementia

This paper describes the creation of a set of dementia friendly instruction cards for participants engaged in a technology research project. The cards were designed to provide support after the research project was completed, so that participants could maintain continued and independent use of the technologies left with them. A literature review of guidelines for creating text, instructions and graphics for people with dementia is almost nonexistent. The iterative process of designing and refining easy to understand instructions, given both a lack of guidelines and the significant cognitive challenges presented by dementia, is described. We conclude that the creation of the cards themselves, and the insights we discovered in creating them are of significant value to assisting people in the uptake of technology. With clear, colourful, easily accessible and visually stimulating instructions, these cards act as a bridge between the technologies and their use, greatly enhancing the ability to support people with dementia in technology use.