Technology and the Older Adults: Designing a Usable Interface

Abstract

New technologies are being introduced with little regard for potentially unique users such as older adults. As a consequence, such users frequently have trouble operating the controls for these new technologies. As a way around these problems, we asked whether a general set of design guidelines could be generated which would improve older adults' performance on existing audio remote controls. In a series of three experiments, we were able to show that older adults did have much more difficulty operating existing remote controls than younger adults, that a common problem lay behind most of those errors, and that general guidelines for the design of audio remote control interfaces emerged which when implemented led to large improvements in performance. The guidelines can be generalized to the much larger set of remote controls, thereby potentially increasing the independence and well being of many older adults.