After a week full of attending interesting online lectures, reading up germane research literature, and observing the older adult population, I now feel confident to list down all the problems being faced by the older population, while adding my own observations from an Indian point of view. Tech literacy is exceptionally low in India's older population (and so will be in other similar countries), and I think that incorporating these points into Project Geriatrix would make it more globally inclusive.
P.S: I would be using the term "Older Adult" very frequently, hence will be abbreviating it to OA for simplicity.
Imagine looking at a list full of characters A-Z, but jumbled up. Now, if you ask a youngster to find a specific alphabet, and repeat the same for an OA; higher probability is that the teenager would point the alphabet out way before than an OA does. The reason is simple, with age, the power of peripheral vision decreases, i.e, the ability to see and process different stuff together decreases.
A younger person might be able to view 4 adjacent characters quickly at once and form a judgment whether the desired alphabet is found or not. On the other hand, OAs have to resort to a linear scan of all the alphabets, one at a time, thereby slowing down the process. The valuable takeaway from this issue is twofold:
My proposed solution:
Various studies around the globe have proven that as soon as a person crosses their 40s, they are highly susceptible to a wide range of motor problems such as low hand-eye coordination, stiffness, hand tremors, etc. A simple activity like drawing a spiral on a sheet of paper too becomes an immensely difficult task for some OAs.
Figure: Spiral drawn by an OA vs spiral drawn by a 23 year old.
Imagine having such a shaky hand, and trying to use a touchscreen UI having small buttons that are very adjacent to each other. Hence, a lot of times, the OA population clicks a wrong button, unintentionally, and consequently, ends up with the wrong operation. According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Documentation, the recommended size for buttons is at least 9mm X 9mm (which is almost the surface area of an index finger tapping a screen), with a small amount of inactive space around. This, however, didn't look promising enough when I implemented it onto a screen.
My proposed solution:
The average OA gets flustered when their mobile device expects them to use gestures to achieve a certain task. Apart from the general inability to assess which gesture to use at which point of time, they struggle with a host of motor control issues that holds them back from actually executing the gestures properly. Take an example of how you access the calculator app on your Android phone.
Step 1: Upward Swipe to open the App Tray. (Tap Count=0, Gesture count=1) Step 2: Scan the App Tray for your intended app. Either search manually by scrolling through the apps, or type the application name in the App Tray's search bar. (Tap Count=0, Gesture Count=2) Step 3: Tap the Calculator App icon. (Tap Count=1, Gesture Count=2)
I was trying to look for a metric that analyses ease/difficulty in accessing certain apps on a mobile launcher, but couldn't find anything relevant. The difficulty scores shouldn't just capture the difficulty to execute the gesture, but should also incorporate the difficulty in predicting the required gesture. Hence, I came up with these scores myself:
So Difficulty to access Calculator App on a usual Android Device: 1(1.0) + 2(3.0) = 7.0
My proposed solution:**