Child’s play, older person’s nightmare
How can children pick up a gadget and use it straight away while parents and grandparents need the kids to set up the new TV or ‘work’ a new device? New research suggests we need more ‘inclusive’ product design.
Above: QUT’s Dr Thea Blackler, industrial design researcher and project leader.
“Middle-aged and older people will form an increasingly important market for technology, so designers and researchers
will need to discover and understand the ‘familiarity’ levels of their target users.“
By Keryn Curtis
Researchers from the People and Systems (PAS) lab in the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) School of Design are proposing a model for ‘adaptable interface design’ to assist designers of everyday gadgets from phones, cameras and alarms to televisions, microwaves and software, to make their products more user friendly and accessible to all ages.
In three studies over four years, researchers looked at the ways in which people in different age groups interact with common contemporary technologies. They found that people over the age of 60 struggle with using contemporary products.
Project director, Dr Thea Blackler, said older people show slower, less intuitive interaction with more errors than younger people. But she said they were surprised that the new research found that younger people – in the 40 to 59 year age group – were also having difficulties.
“When participants were given tasks on products they didn’t own – two alarm clocks and two cameras – both the middle aged and the older age groups were less able to use them quickly and intuitively than the younger group,” said Dr Blackler.
“Past research has found that prior experience with a product is the leading contributor to intuitive use but the new research found that older people were less familiar and used fewer functions on the products they already had in their own homes than younger people.”
This limited familiarity with the functionality of the products they already have meant they were less able to intuitively use newer products or newer versions of the same type of product.
“The finding that middle-aged people (40-59) were familiar with the products they owned but were similar to older people in applying previous experience to new products to gain proficiency suggested that they began to struggle with novel interfaces earlier than previously thought.
We didn’t realise that middle age is when the familiarity is dropping. We don’t know why though we have some theories,” said Dr Blackler.
“Things like not having a lot of time but also maybe there’s an element of people getting tired of changing their technology all the time and they reach a point where they’re happy with the level of functionality they have and they don’t feel the need to have the next latest thing.”
The problem, she points out, is that technology is changing so rapidly that taking a technology break for a few years can quite quickly lead to loss of familiarity and experience. Couple that with the commercial imperative to continue to innovate and the tendency of designers to assume a certain level of familiarity with previous technological interfaces and standardised symbols; and learning to use a new technological device can seem an impossible task.
Middle-aged and older people will form an increasingly important market for technology, says Dr Blackler, so designers and researchers will need to discover and understand the ‘familiarity’ levels of their target users. The research team has developed a Familiarity Identification Tool to help designers with this.
“However, our results suggest past experience or familiarity is not the whole reason for the age differences.”
Dr Blackler said it was well-established that physical declines such as changes in vision and hearing, as well as a reduction in dexterity, could affect the way older people conducted all sorts of daily tasks.
“The research team found cognitive declines were also affecting older people’s intuitive use of technology,” she said.
“Although older people vary tremendously, many suffer some level of cognitive decline at some stage and we found that lower scores on working memory tests correlated strongly with slower, less accurate and less intuitive use of interfaces.”
A new design framework
As well as the Familiarity Identification Tool for designers, the researchers have also come up with a provisional ‘framework’ to guide product development. This is yet to be published and is still being finalised in conjunction with the university’s commercialisation arm, but Dr Blackley says the principle is to make new technologies easier to learn.
“It’s more of an overarching thing. Rather than trying to make something immediately intuitive to use, make it more intuitively learnable. So you still have to learn to use it but it is easier to learn.
“And as part of the scaffolding of that learning, it might have an adaptable interface. It might, for instance have three levels of complexity that you can turn on or off. So there might be the basic operation and functions and that might be all you ever want or need. But there are also other levels of complexity and functionality that you can choose to switch on as you become more familiar or as needs may require.”
“This would help older people but also other people who may have learning difficulties,” she said.
