ICT Service Design for Senior Citizens Based on
Aging Characteristics

3.1 Problems caused by lack of experience or knowledge

The experience and knowledge necessary for using ICT equipment includes the terminology and general ideas necessary for using services as well as experience with operating similar equipment. Here, we introduce two problems related to terminology and operable objects.

3.1.1 Terminology

We must be cautious about utilizing terminology that is not used much in everyday life, or which is used to refer to a different concept. For example, there have been cases in which "Help" was interpreted as "Rescue me!" and the user did not imagine that it would open a page containing guidance. Moreover, "Home" was interpreted as "one's residence", and the user envisioned that it contained information about the household. In particular, many senior citizens are unfamiliar with many terms written in katakana characters. Designers should confirm that katakana terms will be well understood before using them.

3.1.2 Operable objects

Most web page contain many links, but many users who are not experienced with web operation do not know which objects can be selected. In addition, there have been many cases in which senior citizens with knowledge of selectable objects failed to apply their knowledge and so failed to access the links that were available. Senior citizens are particularly inexperienced with text links, so they often fail to notice links that are not underlined or ones that differ only slightly in design from ordinary text. In one case, when options were rather far apart, as shown in Fig. 2, radio buttons or checkboxes were perceived as just circles or squares and thus overlooked.

Fig. 2. Example of design in which radio buttons are overlooked.

An experienced user can recognize selectable objects by moving the mouse pointer to hover over different objects in the hope of triggering a change in appearance such as a change in color. Many users who are inexperienced at operating a personal computer (PC), however, have not acquired such identification methods and are uncertain of such input operations. Therefore, it is important to create a design in which selectable locations can be found intuitively, without pointer movement being required.

Moreover, it has been observed that users who have little experience with input operations by keyboard, remote control, or touch panel can experience many problems with key or button inputs. Errors include inaccurate object selection or excessively long pressing. These findings show that the designer must make operations simple and also widen the permissible range of timing and selection areas.

The problems that we have introduced above were taken from current case examples related to senior citizens. Even younger people, who have a lot of experience with PCs and games machines, will become senior citizens in 20–30 years and they can also be expected to suffer aging-related problems with new technologies of that time.

3.2 Problems arising from aging characteristics

Aging refers to the tendency for functions such as perception, cognition, and motility to deteriorate with age. In this section, we introduce readability as a problem caused by the deterioration in perceptual functions and also failure to notice and coping with the unexpected as problems caused by the deterioration in cognitive functions.

3.2.1 Readability

The eyesight of senior citizens deteriorates with age, for various reasons. About 80% of Japanese people in their 60s have cataracts. When eyesight deteriorates, a variety of symptoms occur, such as details becoming difficult to see, colors taking on a yellowish tinge, and the visual field narrowing. For example, a white-and-orange color scheme will be perceived by senior citizens as having an overall yellow tinge and also poor contrast, resulting in it having reduced readability. For that reason, it is necessary to consider readability in detail even in user interface design. Various methods of coping are being considered, such as increasing size and spacing and increasing contrast. It should be noted, however, that increasing the size too much will make the surrounding information difficult to identify.

3.2.2 Failure to notice

Failure to notice desired information even though it has been provided is a problem that is often observed, particularly in senior citizens. It is said that senior citizens have fewer processing resources^* [2]. These include the attention function, which directs attention to information needed to achieve an objective without being distracted by unnecessary information, and the working memory, which selects the necessary information and holds it temporarily.

Many case examples involving senior citizens have been gathered. A highly visible area attracts their concentration to the exclusion of other areas [3]. In addition, if a large amount of information is presented all at once, they might be unable to process all of it owing to weak working memory. As countermeasures, there are methods of reducing the amount of information by visually gathering similar pieces of information into a chunk.

If there is a change in only one part of a page containing a lot of information, a senior citizen may be unable to notice the change because a paucity of processing resources. Many case examples have been observed. For example, in the example shown in Fig. 3, when a certain category is selected, subcategories appear immediately below it slightly indented. However, some users did not notice the subcategories [4]. Designers of web pages intended for senior citizens must consider making parts that change more obvious in order to attract attention.

Fig. 3. Example of design in which the existence of lower levels is overlooked.

In addition, senior citizens often overlook information that cannot be seen without scrolling, which is thought to be due to insufficient allocation of attention. For senior citizens, information should be accessible without operations such as scrolling as far as possible. And if scrolling is unavoidable, it must be made as intuitive as possible.

3.2.3 Coping with the unexpected

Senior citizens are often observed to be unable to cope with unexpected situations. These problems occur when details that differ from anticipated ones are displayed, unknown terminology is used, or the next operation is not readily apparent. Calmly judging the situation, flexibly changing earlier strategies, and solving problems require advanced cognitive processing abilities such as situational judgment, problem solving, and mental flexibility. However, these abilities are thought to deteriorate with age.

In particular, senior citizens get confused when a motion they made unwittingly is recognized by the system as an input and an unexpected change occurs. We have observed many problems in experiments that examined the use of the iPad. When users touched the touch panel with the palm of the hand or with the hand being used to hold the terminal or when the finger moved while touching the panel, the action was misrecognized as a flick. Such errors are due to weakened control of the fingertips due to deterioration of the motor functions or due to inadvertent contact caused by a poor sense of touch—something that is difficult for a senior citizen to notice. These problems have been observed to be particularly common among senior citizens.