Usability testing in mobile applications involving people with down syndrome: a literature review

We present a review of research related to the usability testing of mobile applications including participants with Down syndrome. The purpose is to identify good usability testing practices and possible guidelines for this process when participants are people with this cognitive disability. These practices and guidelines should account for their specific impairments. We applied document analysis techniques to searches of scientific databases. The results were filtered considering how well they matched the research topic. We processed and reported the classified and summarized results. The main findings of this literature review is that mobile applications usability testing including people with Down syndrome is an issue that has not be comprehensively investigated. While there is some related research, this is incomplete, and there is no single proposal that takes on board all the issues that could be taken into account. Consequently, we propose to develop guidelines on the usability testing process involving participants with Down syndrome. RELACION CON LA TESIS DOCTORAL: En esta publicación se realiza un análisis exhaustivo de trabajos relacionados y las contribuciones previas de los autores y finalmente se demuestra que no existe una guía completa hasta el momento que envuelva todos los aspectos que se quieren proponer, con este paper se se justifica la necesidad de crear una guía enfocada a las personas con Syndrome de Down tomando en cuenta sus deztresas y limitaciones

Evaluation of a usability testing guide for mobile applications focused on people with Down syndrome (USATESTDOWN)

Usability testing of mobile applications involving people with Down syndrome is an issue that has not been comprehensively investigated. There is no single proposal that takes on board all the issues that could potentially be taken into account to deal with the specific needs of people with Down syndrome. We propose a guide for a usability testing process involving participants with Down syndrome. This guide is called USATESTDOWN. It is based on a literature review and experience gained at a number of workshops where people with Down syndrome used mobile devices. This paper briefly describes USATESTDOWN and its application at a special employment centre called PRODIS with 10 participants

Examining the usability of touch screen gestures for elderly people

UCAMI 2016 This paper reports an evaluation of 101 elderly people aged from 61 to 92 years to determine their ability to perform a number of gestures on multi-touch surfaces. We recruited participants at two daycare centres for elderly people in Madrid region. They used the Gesture Games tool to perform the sev-en most common activities on multi-touch surfaces (Tap, Double tap, Long press, Drag, Scale up, Scale down and Rotation). This application automatically generates a log of participant interaction. This log can be used to conduct a transparent quantitative analysis of the information. The main finding of this study is that older adults are perfectly capable of performing all seven tasks. The older adults were found to have different skills levels with respect to the tasks. For example, they found it easy to execute the Scale-down and Scale-up gestures, whereas they found it hard to perform the Double-tap gesture. Finally, the general conclusions of the study are outlined