Introduction
In my last semester of college, I took a class on Human-Computer Interaction where we had to conduct a study as the final assignment, and I was immediately drawn to a topic about accessibility. I began thinking about my mom and grandparents and how they struggle with their smartphones – the tiny buttons, the confusing menus, the small text. It turns out, they're not alone. It is estimated that 5.31 billion people have at least one mobile device, which is 62.5 percent of the world’s population [1][2].
It's easy to forget that not everyone experiences the digital world similarly. The World Health Organization estimates that a billion people with disabilities struggle to use websites and mobile apps. This includes people with visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor impairments, with older adults being a rapidly growing segment of this population. Unfortunately, many apps aren't designed with these users in mind. Studies have shown that common features like small buttons, complex menus, and tiny text create significant barriers for older adults. In fact, research by Ballantyne and Acosta-Vargas found that 90% of the most popular apps in the Google Store violate accessibility guidelines![2]
To see this in action, I conducted a study to explore how these accessibility issues affect older adults. I wanted to understand if simple design changes could truly make a difference. So, I created two versions of the same app: one with accessibility features turned ON (larger text, simplified menus, etc.), and the other with a standard, "OFF" layout. Imagine two versions of the same app: one designed with accessibility in mind, the other not. Which one would your grandparents find easier to use? I observed two groups of elderly users interacting with an app. One group used a version with key accessibility features like larger text and simplified menus (the "ON" version), while the other used a standard layout (the "OFF" version). I then asked them to complete common tasks like finding a product, adding it to the cart, and etc. The results were eye-opening as it quickly became clear that even small design changes could make a huge difference in how easily elderly users could navigate and use the app. Here are my findings that may help you make your application more accessible to old people.
Figure 1: Prototype of the application. It can be seen the design differences for each group and the numbered features that were investigated 1) Navigation tools 2) Color contrast 3) Space between features 4) Font size 5) Diagonal size of features 6) Icons.
Results
Completion Time, Clicks, and Error Rate:
Ideally, when designing a mobile application, software engineers and developers want the user to perform a task easily. The application should be intuitive to allow everyone to use it. Such tasks can be searching the internet, liking a friend's photo, or buying food online. If the application is not intuitive or has a bad design, the user can take long periods to complete a task, risking losing user engagement.
The completion time of the tasks, the total number of clicks, and the error rate of each participant were recorded, and are shown in Table 2. The error rate was calculated by dividing the exceeding number of clicks of each participant by the total number of clicks necessary to complete the experiment, which is 36.
Table 1: Completion time, number of clicks and error rate of each participant.
Analyzing Table 1, it can be seen that the average completion time was different between the two groups. The participants in the Accessibility On group were approximately three minutes faster than those in the Accessibility Off group, with the minimum and maximum being 2 and 10 minutes for the ON group and 5 and 14 minutes for the OFF group.
Interestingly, the total number of clicks and error rate also followed the same pattern as the time completion, in terms of the Accessibility On group having better results. An average of 38 clicks and a 5.5% error rate for the ON group versus 42 clicks and a 16.17% error rate for the OFF group. It can be suggested that the UX design differences between the two groups impacted all three measurements, with the error rate being the most affected. This indicates that the UX design has a crucial role in how the users interact with the app, affecting the completion time and how much they will commit mistakes.
Overall Experience
In addition to the parametric test, the participants for this study also completed a questionnaire at the end of the trial. The first question of the questionnaire was about the overall user experience and how easy to use the app was for the participant. The accessibility on group had overwhelmingly better results compared to the OFF group: the ON group had a mean of 8.9 rating against 3.46 for OFF. The second question can be used to better understand why such a big difference in rating between the groups: when participants were questioned about "What Features of the app did you have most trouble using?", most of the responses indicated that the issues were coming from the OFF group.
From the accessibility OFF group, 11 participants selected "Icons" as the hardest feature to understand, followed by 8 for "Text", 6 for "Buttons", 2 for "Colors" and "Navigation", 1 for "All of them" and 1 for "None of them". On the other hand, from the ON group, 9 participants answered "None of them", 1 for "Buttons", 1 for "Icons" and 2 for "Navigation".
It is visible that the UX design for the ON group positively impacted the user experience as 69% of the participants in this group had no issues at all ("None of them" option selected) with the features being studied, against the 7% in the OFF group (Only one participant in the OFF group did not have issues).
Icons
"Icon" was the feature with which participants had the most trouble. 69.2% of the participants had an issue understanding what each icon meant. Interestingly, even participants in the ON group said it would be easier if text was used with the icons, even though the accessibility-on group design had text with the icons. This corroborates with Franz and Wobbrock, who state that older people have extreme difficulty understanding and dealing with icons [3].
Regarding the buttons rating, the accessibility On group had an average of 4.69 rating while OFF had an average of 2.3 rating. In the short answer question, 6 participants had very similar responses when questioned about "How would you make the buttons better to use?". Participants 5 and 14 answered: "Larger", Participants 6, 8, and 10 wrote: "Bigger" and Participant 9, "Wider". This corroborates with Khan, Prasara, and Bogdan who described that elders find the buttons to be too small in the majority of the mobile applications [4][5][6].
Figure 2: Moving the cart icon from the app bar to the navigation allows us to use text with it. It can be a way of solving the issue of participants not knowing what the icon means.
Text
An interesting finding was for the Font size feature. Exactly 50% of the participants responded that it would be helpful if the font text were bigger. Even more fascinating was the fact that every one of the ON group answered "No," while every one of the OFF group answered "Yes" when questioned: "Would it be helpful if the font text were bigger?", suggesting that the font size is a significant problem for older people.
This study used a font size of 30 for the accessibility-on group and 15 for the OFF group, which contradicts the findings of Bogdan, who suggested a minimum of 14 points for more elderly-friendly designs [6]. With these findings, it can be suggested that, instead of 14 points, a minimum of 30 points for the font size is more appropriate.
It seems that the larger font size in the accessibility-on version made a significant difference in readability for the participants. This highlights the importance of considering larger font sizes than previously recommended in designs for older adults.
Navigation, space between features, and color contrast
One intriguing result from the questionnaire is that no participant, either in group ON or OFF, responded that they had an issue with the spacing between elements. However, it was observed in the OFF group that participants 14, 19, 21, and 25 had issues identifying the product cards on multiple pages. The cards contained information about each product, such as the name, price, and picture, and they were selecting the wrong product, thinking they were selecting the correct one. A question to be asked is if this problem was due to the color contrast (since all the cards and the background were white), the spacing between the cards (which was set to be minimum), or a mix of both.
In addition, in the OFF group, many participants did not know which of the "Add to cart" buttons, "Increment," and "Decrement" buttons were relative to a certain product (Figure 3). The cards were so close together, and there was no color contrast that they could not differentiate if the buttons were in the card of the product they were interested in or in the previous product card. Figure 4 shows how this problem became more evident due to the fact that they could not read the text inside of cards (the name of the product) and used the images as a reference to search for products. Most likely, the lack of spacing, color contrast, and the small size of the product title were responsible for the confusion of many participants in the OFF group. It can be suggested that the lack of color contrast and spacing between the cards, allied with the small font size, resulted in difficulty identifying the correct button for the product, which resulted in a higher error rate for the OFF group.
Figure 3: Participants of the OFF group could not read the description of the products and were using the image as a reference. However, they could not identify if the top or bottom "Add to cart" button was relative to the product they were looking for.
Most participants, either from the ON or OFF group, had no issues with the navigation features. Out of the 26 responses to the question, "Did you have a hard time navigating through the app?", 84.6% answered "No." Even though all the "Yes" responses were from participants from the OFF group, it may be concluded that navigation is not a very serious issue for the elderly.
Conclusion
This study used two different UX designs—one following the guidelines of elderly accessibility and the other using the most common feature design found in many applications available in the Google App Store—to test if elder performance would be affected. The results have shown significant differences in performance between the two groups, with the difference in completion time average being almost three full minutes and an error rate three times higher when not using accessibility features. In addition, with the questionnaire responses, it was possible to draw some interesting conclusions regarding how best to use icons, font size, and color contrast to make the application more elder-friendly and universal for everyone.
References
[1] Datareportal. [n. d.] Digital around the world - datareportal – global digital insights. (). https://datareportal.com/global-digital-overview.
[2] Patricia Acosta-Vargas, Belén Salvador-Acosta, Rasa Zalakeviciute, Katiuska Alexandrino, Jorge-Luis Pérez-Medina, Yves Rybarczyk, and Mario Gonzalez.2020. Accessibility assessment of mobile meteorological applications for users with low vision. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics. Springer, 199–205.
[3] Rachel L Franz, Jacob O Wobbrock, Yi Cheng, and Leah Findlater. 2019. Perception and adoption of mobile accessibility features by older adults experiencing ability changes. In The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 267–278.
[4] Khan Kalimullah and Donthula Sushmitha. 2017. Influence of design elements in mobile applications on user experience of elderly people. Procedia computer science, 113, 352–359.
[5] Prasara Jakkaew and Tew Hongthong. 2017. Requirements elicitation to develop mobile application for elderly. In 2017 International Conference on Digital Arts, Media and Technology (ICDAMT). IEEE, 464–467
[6] Ioana Iancu and Bogdan Iancu. 2020. Designing mobile technology for elderly. a theoretical overview. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 155, 119977.
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