Bull, Christopher Neil

Davies, Nigel Andrew Justin

Harding, Michael Paul

Hayes, James Niall

Knowles, Brandin Hanson

Mikusz, Mateusz Andrzej

Lancaster E-Prints

Designing Mobile Applications for Older AdultsChristopher N. BullLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKc.bull@lancaster.ac.ukMike HardingLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKm.harding@lancaster.ac.ukMateusz MikuszLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKm.mikusz@lancaster.ac.ukBran KnowlesLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKb.h.knowles1@lancaster.ac.ukNigel DaviesLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKn.a.davies@lancaster.ac.ukNiall HayesLancaster UniversityLancaster, UKn.hayes@lancaster.ac.ukImprovements in food, health and hygiene are delivering aworld with an increasing number of older adults. In paral-lel, society is becoming increasingly dependant on moderntechnology with public and private services such as shop-ping, banking and civic interactions migrating on-line. Whilemany services are aimed (implicitly or explicitly) at youngerdemographics, their importance to older adults cannot beoverstated. Mobile devices would appear to offer an idealroute for older adults to access digital services given theportability, low-cost and controlled nature of most mobileplatforms. As a result, there has been significant research intodesigning systems (fixed and mobile) that address the physi-cal, cognitive and sensory needs of older adults [4]. However,to date the vast majority of this research has focused on HCIissues [4], e.g. creating new user interface widgets for thosewith limited hand-eye coordination. Such initiatives havehad limited success, with many of the research challengesthat existed 20 years ago continuing to be re-explored [3].We ran a series of co-creation workshops with older adultsto support the design and implementation of appropriate mo-bile applications for this demographic group. Co-creationis a process designed to draw out end-user wants, needs,constraints and suggested solutions in ways that contributeto the development of tools that are effective, fit for pur-pose and solve real user problems [2]. Older adults are of-ten overlooked in the development of technologies, whichcontributes to the precarious position many older adultsincreasingly face, as access to basic services is mediatedthrough these technologies. We based our activities on avalues-led and technology- mediated innovation co-creationframework that has been developed across domains involv-ing hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups in technology in-novation projects [1]. Initially, we conducted a total of 25interviews and four workshops with older adults to gain afirst understanding of experiences and insight into how toappropriately focus the workshop activities. The co-creationphase then featured 12 workshops in which a mobile appli-cation was designed and developed.The co-creation workshops allowed us to identify a setof system design considerations in the areas of usage mod-els, trust and security, and adoption that we believe needto be addressed by mobile applications designed for olderadults. For example, in terms of usage models older adultsdescribed many situations where, instead of having theirdevices always-on, their mobile device was used on an “on-demand basis”—a distinctive characteristic compared to themajority of mobile phone users.In this poster we describe our co-creation process and ourinitial system considerations – placing them in the contextof broader initiatives to engage older adults with technology.These design considerations should be of interest to a widerange of researchers involved in creating systems to supportmobile applications, both those targeted at the general publicand those specifically focused on older adults.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe thank AgeUK, SLDC and our user group participants. MobileAge has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020research and innovation programme under Grant No.: 693319.REFERENCES[1] Chiara Garattini, Joseph Wherton, and David Prendergast. 2012. Link-ing the Lonely: An Exploration of a Communication Technology De-signed to Support Social Interaction Among Older Adults. Univers.Access Inf. Soc. 11, 2 (June 2012), 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-011-0235-y[2] Peter Gregor, Alan F. Newell, and Mary Zajicek. 2002. Designing forDynamic Diversity: Interfaces for Older People. In Proceedings of theFifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets ’02).ACM, New York, NY, USA, 151–156. https://doi.org/10.1145/638249.638277[3] Bran Knowles and Vicki L. Hanson. 2018. The Wisdom of Older Tech-nology (Non-)Users. Commun. ACM. (2018). (in press).[4] Andraž Petrovčič, Sakari Taipale, Ajda Rogelj, and Vesna Dolničar. 2017.Design of Mobile Phones for Older Adults: An Empirical Analysis ofDesign Guidelines and Checklists for Feature Phones and Smartphones.International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (2017). https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2017.1345142 (in press).

Designing Mobile Applications for Older Adults

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/123931/1/bull_hotmobile18.pdf

Designing Mobile Applications for Older Adults

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