Feature-rich applications such as word processors and spreadsheets are not only being used by working adults but increasingly also used by children and older adults in highly varied contexts. Learning these applications is challenging as they offer hundreds of commands throughout the interface. We investigate how newcomers from different age groups explore the user interface of a feature-rich application to determine, locate and use relevant features. We conducted an in-lab observational study with 10 children (10-12), 10 adults (20-35) and 10 older adults (60-75) who were all first-time users of Microsoft OneNote. Our results illustrate key exploration differences across age groups, including that children were careful and performed as efficiently as the adults, although they struggled to locate contextual menus, whereas older adults spent a longer time and repeated sequences of failed selections. Further, older adults' exploration style was negatively influenced by their past knowledge of similar applications. We discuss design interventions for HCI to better accommodate the age-related differences in exploration styles when users interact with a feature-rich application for the first time.

Figure 1: Overview of the interface showing a list of readings with their fixation counts. Users can select a reading to clean the data or run a prediction on all readings to investigate the gaze pattern associated with a self interruption.