The normal effects of aging include some decline in cognitive, perceptual, and motor abilities. This can have a negative effect on the performance of a number of tasks, including basic pointing and selection tasks common to today's graphical user interfaces. This paper describes a study of the effectiveness of two interaction techniques: area cursors and sticky icons, in improving the performance of older adults in basic selection tasks. The study described here indicates that when combined, these techniques can decrease target selection times for older adults by as much as 50°/0 when applied to the most difficult cases (smallest selection targets).At the same time these techniques are shown not to impede performance in cases known to be problematical for related techniques (e.g., differentiation between closely spaced targets) and to provide similar but smaller benefits for younger users.

Two user studies were performed to evaluate the effect of level-of-detail (LOD) degradation in the periphery of head-mounted displays on visual search performance. In the first study, spatial detail was degraded by reducing resolution. In the second study, detail was degraded in the color domain by using grayscale in the periphery. In each study, 10 subjects were given a complex search task that required users to indicate whether or not a target object was present among distracters. Subjects used several different displays varying in the amount of detail presented. Frame rate, object location, subject input method, and order of display use were all controlled. The primary dependent measures were search time on correctly performed trials and the percentage of all trials correctly performed. Results indicated that peripheral LOD degradation can be used to reduce color or spatial visual complexity by almost half in some search tasks without significantly reducing performance.

In general, as people age, their movement control performance gets worse. Older adults take longer than younger adults to make similar movements. In this study we compared older and younger experienced computer users on their ability to use a mouse to position a cursor. The distance of the movements and the size of the targets were varied to represent a broad range of cursor control tasks that would be used on a computer. We also investigated the effects that dynamic gain adjustment had on performance for both age groups. Our results showed that older adults are both slower and less accurate when using the mouse. There was evidence that the age-related difference in performance was greater when the target size was smaller. Some of the difference in age-related performance could be ameliorated by using a specific dynamic gain function. The results are used to discuss possible age-related computer interface design guidelines INTRODUCTION

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