How to Help Older Adults Move the Focus on a Smart TV? Exploring the Effects of Arrow Hints and Element Size Consistency

ABSTRACT

The current interfaces of smart TVs (STVs) lack an effective customization that is consistent with the needs of older adults. Accordingly, this study investigates the usability problems encountered by older adults when using STVs, and it identifies solutions to the most frequent problem. In the pilot study, a usability test was conducted and the difficulty of focus manipulation was found to be the most frequent one. Then in the main study, an experiment was conducted to evaluate two solutions (i.e., maintaining consistent element size and adding arrow hints), which involved remote control (RC) and touchscreen interaction (TI) input methods. Fifty-three older adults were recruited to participate in the study and thus four findings were found. First, the task completion time for manipulating focus increases with age and it rapidly increases after 75 years of age. Second, using a simplified RC can significantly improve the task effectiveness and decrease the number of keystrokes and the completion time for manipulating focus when compared with TI. While when using TI, after adding arrow hints to the STV interface the task completion time and the number of keystrokes are reduced. Third, for both input methods, when the interface comprises elements with inconsistent sizes, adding arrow hints was observed to enhance the task effectiveness and shorten the task completion time. However, the arrow hints were counterproductive when the element sizes were consistent. Fourth, the majority of elderly participants preferred to use arrow hints in the STV interface.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Municipal Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing under Grant cstc2016jcyjA0406; and National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 71661167006.

Notes on contributors

Xiwen Ouyang

Xiwen Ouyang has been registered as a full-time student in the Master’s degree program in the department of Industrial Engineering (branch of human–computer interaction) at Chongqing University. Her research focuses on usability of Smart TV for older adults.

Jia Zhou

Jia Zhou is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Chongqing University and used to be a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on design mobile devices for older adults.