Design of Mobile Phones for Older Adults: An Empirical Analysis of Design Guidelines and Checklists for Feature Phones and Smartphones

ABSTRACT

Design guidelines and checklists are suggested as a useful tool in the development and evaluation of interface design of mobile phones for older adults. Given the intense evolution of mobile phone design, understanding how the design guidelines and checklists have taken into account the advances in mobile phone usability for older adults is important for their correct application and future development. Thus, this study explores the usability dimensions of mobile phone design for older adults and the related changes in terms of time and the type of device (feature phones vs. smartphones) based on an expert coding of the eight mobile phone design guidelines and checklists for older adults published between 2006 and 2014. The results of the expert coding show that design guidelines and checklists most frequently deal with visual and haptic issues (e.g., high contrast, button type, and button size), whilst they hardly ever address various elements of textual interface (e.g., ease of text entry, a button’s feedback, and font type). Over time, the design guidelines and checklists have become more complex in terms of the average number of included usability categories and dimensions. For smartphones, the guidelines, on average, put more emphasis on the screen, touchscreen, text, and exterior related issues, whereas the design guidelines for feature phones stress the usability of the keypad and menus. Besides revealing potential usability dimensions that could be further expanded in the guidelines, this study also highlights the need for research that would empirically validate the design guidelines and checklists in the future.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Matjaž Debevc, Ph.D., for offering his assistance in the data collection process, and the reviewers of this article for their helpful comments and suggestions to improve this article.

Funding

This study received public financial support from research grants (number L5-6818 and L5-7626) administered through the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).

Notes

¹. Even though there is no full agreement on the definition (and differences) between a feature phone and a smartphone, we follow Callegaro, Lozar Manfreda, and Vehovar (2015), who suggested that a feature phone has fewer functions than a smartphone. While feature phones may allow web browsing, they provide no or limited support for Wi-Fi Internet access, touchscreen capabilities, and/or the downloading of applications. Accordingly, a smartphone can be described as a device that offers advanced functions and services that generally require a touchscreen and progressive computing capabilities, including an advanced mobile operating system that supports the downloading and running of applications (Callegaro et al., 2015). We use the term mobile phone when referring to both feature phones and smartphones.

². Available from http://dikul.uni-lj.si/.

³. More precisely, Calak (2013) was able to empirically validate only 9 of the 19 suggested heuristics.

⁴. In seven of the eight analyzed design guidelines and checklists, the items were clustered in two or more dimensions/categories. Before the inspection of the three expert raters, these dimensions/categories were removed from the classification form.

⁵. Since we used a systematic procedure to identify all suitable design guidelines and checklists published in the literature, we assumed that the eight analyzed units represent the population of all available units that met the selection criteria. Thus, in the analyses, we did not run statistical significance tests.

⁶. Due to the suggestion of Henze et al. (2011) that touchscreen-based smartphones represent the dominant format of smartphones today, as well the smallest number of units, the categories of touchscreen-based phones and smartphones were combined into one category in the analysis.

⁷. The decision to analyze the percentage of categories addressed within each dimension stemmed from the fact that the dimensions did not have an equal number of categories (Table 6). For example, the dimension of Keypad included eight categories, while that of Text included only three categories.

Additional information

Funding

This study received public financial support from research grants (number L5-6818 and L5-7626) administered through the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).

Notes on contributors

Andraž Petrovčič

Andraž Petrovčič, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Informatics in the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research interests include mobile usability, age-friendly interaction design, and socio-technical aspects of older adults’ interactions with new technologies for independent living at home.

Sakari Taipale

Sakari Taipale, Ph.D., works as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. His current research projects relate to the use of mobile communication and the internet across the life course and between generations.

Ajda Rogelj

Ajda Rogelj, M.A., received a Masters in Social Informatics from University of Ljubljana. Currently, she works as a research methods expert at the National Institute of Public Health of the Republic of Slovenia and is an active member of its core research team. Her interests include micro and macro implementation of e-health and e-care services.

Vesna Dolničar

Vesna Dolničar, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Social Informatics in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has been involved in more than 20 (inter)national research projects (e.g. FP6, Interreg, COST Actions, LLP, Erasmus+, EC tenders) related to the fields of digital inequalities and acceptability of e-care and e-health solutions.