Age-Friendly Design of Smartphones. A must or an option today?

The human factors and ergonomics literature claims that the slow uptake of smartphones amongst older adults is related to scarce implementation of age-friendly design guidelines for smartphone user interfaces. Therefore, this presentation will lay out an informative overview of guidelines and heuristics for an age-friendly design of user interfaces on smartphones by presenting their evolution and suitability over time. Implications of gesture and touch-based small-screen interfaces will be discussed in the context of age-dependent modalities of older adults that stem from their perception/sensation, cognition, and/or movement limitations. In addition, the results of selected studies will be shown and discussed which empirically verified the importance of age-friendly interface guidelines for usability performance of older adults on smartphones. Lecture held in the frame of the ZPID Colloquium, 22 November 2018, 1pm - 3pm