A Study on the Icon Feedback Types of Small Touch Screen for the Elderly

Abstract

Abstract. Small touch screens are widely used in applications such as bank ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, ticket vending machines, facsimiles, and home automation in the daily life. It is intuition-oriented and easy to operate. There are a lot of elements that affect the small screen touch performance. One of the essential parts is icon feedback. However, to merely achieve beautiful icon feedback appearance and create interesting interaction experience, many interface designers ignore the real user needs. It is critical for them to trade off the icon feedback type associated with the different users needs in the touch interaction. This is especially important when the user capability is very limited. This paper described a pilot study for identifying factors that determine the icon feedback usability on small touch screen in four older adult Cognitrone groups since current research aimed mostly at general icon guidelines and recommendations and failed to consider and define the specific needs of small touch screen interfaces for the elderly. In this paper, we presented a concept from the focus on human necessity and use a cognitive assessment tool, which is, Cognitrone test, to measure older adult's attention and concentration capability and learn more about how to evaluate and design suitable small screen icon feedback types. Forty-five elder participants were participated. Each subject was asked to complete a battery of Cognitrone tests and divided into 4 groups. Each subject was also requested to perform a set of 'continuous touch' usability tasks on small touch screen and comment on open-ended questions. Results are discussed with respect to the perceptual and cognitive factors that influence older adults in the use of icon feedback on small touch screen. It showed significant associations between icon feedback performance and factors of attention and concentration. However, this interrelation was much stronger for the Group 2 and Group 4, especially for Type B, Type C and Type G. Moreover, consistent with previous research, older participants were less sensitive and required longer time to adapt to the high-detailed icon feedback. These results are discussed in terms of icon feedback design strategies for interface designers.

The Effect of Dyadic Interactions on Learning Rotate Gesture for Technology-Naïve Older Adults

“…Typically, older adults needed more time to complete the given tasks [10] and were also prone to make more errors than younger participants [26]. In addition, task performance can be affected by manual dexterity [27], visual impairment [30] and cognitive effort [53].…”

The Link-Offset-Scale Mechanism for Improving the Usability of Touch Screen Displays on the Web

“…Even though touch screen displays are classified as intuition-oriented and easy to learn input devices, they present several limitations to be overcome by the user [17], which include:…”

“…Abowd et al [1] describe touch screen devices as direct input mechanisms, that fit Pervasive Computing environments by providing natural interaction between the user and the computer. Touch screen interfaces are classified as "direct" input devices because of the integration between interface control and other information in a single surface [17]. The unification of input/output, control/feedback, hand gestures and eye movements suggests to researchers the idea that touch screen displays are intuition-oriented, particularly for non-frequent computer users [14].…”

“…There have been many studies which approach how to improve general usability for touch screen devices [8,9,11,12,18,20]. These studies consider different interaction design features that improve the usability for touch screen displays, considering the low accuracy it presents given the "fat finger problem", low-perception of pointing mechanisms, difficulties in the selection of small objects, among others [17]. It is worth noticing that these studies present design principles that should be addressed by interface designers.…”

A Mobile Interface for the Older User

“…A number of researchers investigated the design of specific features of the interaction such as button size, number and spacing of targets, text-entry performance and typing patterns, icon feedback types, gestures etc. [12][13][14][15][16]. The upshot of those studies was the acknowledgement of a number of issues that need to be addressed in order for seniors to benefit fully from the functionality offered by mobile phones.…”