Design of Interactive Tutorials on Mobile Applications for Chinese Middle-Aged and Older Adults

Abstract

With the rapid speed of development for information technology in China, Chinese middle-aged and older adults benefit from various of mobile applications and services. However, most of them have difficulty to learn to use these mobile technologies. Thus, the goal of research is to design an interactive tutorial for middle-aged and older adults, which can adapt to existing applications. By conducting a survey to investigate their requirements for smartphone mobile applications tutorials and doing empirical analysis of the survey, we designed "Help Center", which solves the problems we found from the survey study: 1) by implementing a fixed FAB (Floating Action Button) button as the access of help feature, the problem that users "can't find the help features in a mobile application" is solved; 2) by implementing a PIP (picture in picture) tutorial, which allows users to do operations while watching the instructions, the problem that users "can remember nothing but easy instructions of on-boarding tutorials" is solved; 3) "learning center" feature solves the problem that users "don't know how to express the problems that they are facing with"; 4) "icons and features" feature solves the recurrent problem of users "feeling confused with the meanings of icons and features".

Older Women's Views on Their Participation in a Blended Educational Program Using Fb Room Platform

“…Learners were very pleased with the way the videos were produced and the features they offered, namely narration and subtitles, and the fact that they were on YouTube, which made them available at any time. These results are consistent with the findings of and Chen et al (2017), who concluded that videos should contain multiple pieces of information. These studies have also found that the duration of video lessons plays a very important role, as they can be tedious if they are too long.…”

“…This piece of information can be used when designing lessons on the use of smartphones for older people. In a similar vein, the findings of this study showed that, due to the ease of access via YouTube and the embedded narration and subtitles, video lessons might prove to be useful in a blended learning programme as they help participants learn easier and faster Chen et al, 2017). Women's views on the effectiveness of video lessons compared to face-to-face lessons tend to be similar, "I believe that they are almost on par with face-to-face lessons"(L4), and they also seemed to appreciate the flexibility in terms of time and location that they offer, "I watched most videos twice, but the best thing was that they were all on YouTube, which meant I could watch them whenever and wherever I wanted" (L3).…”

“…Moreover, another way to help seniors get acquainted with smartphone applications is to develop manuals and tutorials that focus on ameliorating the basic learnability of mobile applications designed for older adults . Designing interactive video tutorials for the elderly that adapt to existing applications will help them learn mobile applications more independently and at their own pace (Chen et al, 2017). demonstrated how many seniors, especially those without prior relevant experience, prefer video tutorials with embedded help text.…”