A comparison of the usability of a standard and an age-friendly smartphone launcher: experimental evidence from usability testing with older adults

Abstract

Age-friendly smartphone launchers are tools designed to enhance smartphone handling among older adults with cognitive and functional limitations. Although evidence exists about the positive effects of age-friendly smartphone launchers on older adults' usability performance in general, little is known about how the design and interface complexity of these launchers affect their interface usability effectiveness and efficiency compared with standard Android smartphone interfaces. Thus, in this study, a randomized crossover experiment involving 50 older smartphone users, aged 60 years and above, was guided by the principles of summative usability testing to assess whether an age-friendly launcher performs better than a standard Android launcher performs and to investigate the relationship between the user interface complexity and usability performance of launchers. The results of usability tests in which each participant solved 10 tasks on both launchers indicate that the two tested launchers had comparable effectiveness (i.e. completeness with which participants achieved the test tasks' goals), whereas the age-friendly launcher marginally outperformed its standard Android counterpart in terms of efficiency (i.e. the amount of time used by participants to solve the test tasks). The results also demonstrate that lower user interface complexity is associated with higher effectiveness and efficiency, suggesting that age-friendly smartphone launchers might lead to higher adoption rates of smartphones among older adults if interface designers could reduce their cognitive complexity by limiting the number of steps and alternative paths for task completion.

Improving the Measurement of Older Adults’ Mobile Device Proficiency: Results and Implications from a Study of Older Adult Smartphone Users

“…Smartphone medication management apps hold promise with respect to helping individuals with this task [19]. Likewise, smartphone rehabilitation apps were shown to be promising for delivering therapeutic treatment to (older) patients, improving not only their health conditions but also other aspects of quality of life [20]. While technology proficiency benefits all, the benefits to older adults may be especially great [9], [21].…”

“…The goal of the presented study was to address these limitations, using a dataset that included both the MDPQ-46 information and objective measures of smartphone performance [20], with a special focus on advancing the understanding of the construct [24] and criterion validity [25]. The aim of this paper is to establish the construct validity of MDPQ-46 with convergent and discriminant validation, as well as to assess criterion validity by comparing selfreported proficiency with an objective measure of proficiency (i.e., task performance metrics collected in usability tests).…”

“…For details on study design see Petrovčič et al[20] 4. The post-test data are not reported in this study.FIGURE 1.…”

How is the Elderly’s Capability to Use Smartphones in Banda Aceh

“…Furthermore, the calendar devices are less capable of being used in some older people [23]. Petrovčič et al [24], in their research, found that more than half of their respondents were able to use calendar devices as reminders to help them remember the day and date, record specific events, and remind them to the following schedule.…”

Usability Barriers for Elderly Users in Smartphone App Usage: An Analytical Hierarchical Process-Based Prioritization

“…Barrier BA1' small font, screen size, font type, buttons, and color contrast' has the highest priority. Barrier BA15 "complex interface and function" is the 2nd critical barrier [30,33,39]. BA6 "Visual feedback of operation" is the third higly cited usablity barrier in the reported literature [32].…”