Theory: The Elderly and Smartphones

We found that researching literature on how elderly people interact with smartphones was very giving, but also that it was a surprisingly small field of study. Older people inexperienced with smartphones is  becoming a smaller group of people day by day and therefore the field seems to be considered with little interest. This, and the large differences in lifestyle between elderly in different parts of the world make it hard to find relevant literature as much research is conducted in USA and China. Still, here we present some of the findings that we have used to make decisions during our process.


The article Motivations and obstacles to smartphone use by the elderly: developing a research framework summarizes  findings from different studies. For example, it lists a few very obstructing features in mobile applications. This has helped to make it clear what we has to avoid in our design. One primary obstruction is the physical limitations common to older people that can complicate smartphone use - impaired sight, motor skills and finger dexterity. Also, cognitive abilities can be a problem as it is sometimes hard to recall and/or process the amount of information on screen. Therefore distracting and superfluos elements have been cut to a minimum in our prototype. Moreover, the article hints that several studies show that visibility and usability should be connected – the most used functionality should also be the most visible.

We attempt to address these issues in our design by strongly linking visibility and usability, for example by designing large buttons with clearly readable text. This is thouroughly explored in the article A Study of Pointing Performance of Elderly Users on Smartphones where size and spacing is shown to closely influence task completion. Audiotory and audio-tactile feedback is shown to be very positive for elderly users (though only tactile feedback is detrimental to this user group). Therefore, we will try to implement audiotory and tactile feedback in our application. However, the main issue is shown to often be of cognitive character. That elderly seems to not find navigation as easy and intuitive as younger people has since become a whole field of study in itself. Our app is very easy to use in this regard.

One article that explores navigation systems is Mobile interface design for low-literacy populations. Though literacy levels in Sweden are generally very high, we found this study very interesting as it thoroughly explores how users with a previous low level of contact with smartphones react to different navigation strategies. The study inspired our more linear navigation as errors seem to be fewer in this type of navigation, and we decided (as stated in the 6.1 Design Recommendations) to “start every action from the same location” – in our case the HOME (photo) screen. This study also provided very hands on background to some other desicions we had previously debated. For example, once HOME screen is reached our app, out maximum path length is very short – just 2 steps. Therefore we opted out of a HOME button and instead implemented a BACK one. The study also mentions scrollbars as a new phenomenon to most participants in the study, but one that most learned how to use very quickly, and so we decided to implement this in our app even though we previously had wanted to limit ourselves to clickable functions which we believed to be more intuitive.