Approaches to designing for older adults' intuitive interaction with complex devices

Many older people have difficulties using modern consumer products due to increased product complexity both in terms of functionality and interface design. Previous research has shown that older people have more difficulty in using complex devices intuitively when compared to the younger. Furthermore, increased life expectancy and a falling birth rate have been catalysts for changes in world demographics over the past two decades. This trend also suggests a proportional increase of older people in the work-force. This realisation has led to research on the effective use of technology by older populations in an effort to engage them more productively and to assist them in leading independent lives. Ironically, not enough attention has been paid to the development of interaction design strategies that would actually enable older users to better exploit new technologies. Previous research suggests that if products are designed to reflect people's prior knowledge, they will appear intuitive to use. Since intuitive interfaces utilise domain-specific prior knowledge of users, they require minimal learning for effective interaction. However, older people are very diverse in their capabilities and domain-specific prior knowledge. In addition, ageing also slows down the process of acquiring new knowledge. Keeping these suggestions and limitations in view, the aim of this study was set to investigate possible approaches to developing interfaces that facilitate their intuitive use by older people. In this quest to develop intuitive interfaces for older people, two experiments were conducted that systematically investigated redundancy (the use of both text and icons) in interface design, complexity of interface structure (nested versus flat), and personal user factors such as cognitive abilities, perceived self-efficacy and technology anxiety. All of these factors could interfere with intuitive use. The results from the first experiment suggest that, contrary to what was hypothesised, older people (65+ years) completed the tasks on the text only based interface design faster than on the redundant interface design. The outcome of the second experiment showed that, as expected, older people took more time on a nested interface. However, they did not make significantly more errors compared with younger age groups. Contrary to what was expected, older age groups also did better under anxious conditions. The findings of this study also suggest that older age groups are more heterogeneous in their capabilities and their intuitive use of contemporary technological devices is mediated more by domain-specific technology prior knowledge and by their cognitive abilities, than chronological age. This makes it extremely difficult to develop product interfaces that are entirely intuitive to use. However, by keeping in view the cognitive limitations of older people when interfaces are developed, and using simple text-based interfaces with flat interface structure, would help them intuitively learn and use complex technological products successfully during early encounter with a product. These findings indicate that it might be more pragmatic if interfaces are designed for intuitive learning rather than for intuitive use. Based on this research and the existing literature, a model for adaptable interface design as a strategy for developing intuitively learnable product interfaces was proposed. An adaptable interface can initially use a simple text only interface to help older users to learn and successfully use the new system. Over time, this can be progressively changed to a symbols-based nested interface for more efficient and intuitive use.

HCI for city farms : design challenges & opportunities

Urban agriculture plays an important role in many facets of food security, health and sustainability. The city farm is one such manifestation of urban agriculture: it functions as a location centric social hub that supplies food, education, and opportunities for strengthening the diverse sociocultural fabrics of the local community. This paper presents the case of Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, Australia as an opportunity space for design. The paper iden-tifies four areas that present key challenges and opportunities for HCI design that support social sustainability of the city farm: A preference for face-to-face contact leads to inconsistencies in shared knowledge; a dependence on volun-teers and very limited resources necessitates easily accessible interventions; other local urban agricultural activity needing greater visibility; and the vulner-ability of the physical location to natural phenomenon, in this instance flooding, present a design challenge and a need to consider disaster management.

EatChaFood : challenging technology design to slice food waste production

This paper presents work in progress of EatChaFood – a prototype app designed to increase user knowledge of the currently available domestic supply and location of food, with a view to reducing expired household food waste. In order to reap the benefits that EatChaFood can provide we explore ways to overcome manual data entry as a barrier to use. Our user study has to recognise the limitations of the prototype app, and conduct an evaluation of the interaction design built into the app to promote behaviour change. Innovations in the near future such as the automatic scanning of barcodes on food items or photo-recognition will close the gap between perceived prototype usability and usefulness.

TrainRoulette : promoting situated in-train social interaction between passengers

Travelling by public transport is usually regarded as boring and uninteresting. Refraining from talking to the stranger next to you may be due to limitations that are self-imposed and further corroborated by social expectations and cultural norms that govern behaviour in public space. Our design research into passenger interactions on board of urban commuter trains has informed the development of the TrainRoulette prototype – a mobile app for situated, real-time chats between train passengers. We study the impact of our design intervention on shaping perceptions of the train journey experience. Moreover, we are interested in the implications of such ICT-mediated interactions within train journeys for stimulating social offline interactions and new forms of passenger engagement.

Beyond designing : roles of the designer in complex design projects

Human computer interaction and interaction design have recognised the need for participatory methods of co-design to contribute to designing human-centred interfaces, systems and services. Design thinking has recently developed as a set of strategies for human-centred co-design in product innovation, management and organisational transformation. Both developments place the designer in a new mediator role, requiring new skills than previously evident. This paper presents preliminary findings from a PhD case study of strategy and innovation consultancy Second Road to discuss these emerging roles of design lead, facilitator, teacher and director in action.

An urban informatics approach to smart city learning in architecture and urban design education

This study aims to redefine spaces of learning to places of learning through the direct engagement of local communities as a way to examine and learn from real world issues in the city. This paper exemplifies Smart City Learning, where the key goal is to promote the generation and exchange of urban design ideas for the future development of South Bank, in Brisbane, Australia, informing the creation of new design policies responding to the needs of local citizens. Specific to this project was the implementation of urban informatics techniques and approaches to promote innovative engagement strategies. Architecture and Urban Design students were encouraged to review and appropriate real-time, ubiquitous technology, social media, and mobile devices that were used by urban residents to augment and mediate the physical and digital layers of urban infrastructures. Our study’s experience found that urban informatics provide an innovative opportunity to enrich students’ place of learning within the city.

Improving the design of online applications for social benefit through a behaviour change model

Community support agencies routinely employ a web presence to provide information on their services. While this online information provision helps to increase an agency’s reach, this paper argues that it can be further extended by mapping relationships between services and by facilitating two-way communication and collaboration with local communities. We argue that emergent technologies, such as locative media and networking tools, can assist in harnessing this social capital. However, new applications must be designed in ways that both persuade and support community members to contribute information and support others in need. An analysis of the online presence of community service agencies and social benefit applications is presented against Fogg’s Behaviour Model. From this evaluation, design principles are proposed for developing new locative, collaborative online applications for social benefit.

Gestural, emergent and expressive : three research themes for haptic interaction

Drawing on three case studies of work in the fields of participatory design, interaction design and electronic arts, we reflect on the implications of these studies for haptic interface research. We propose three themes: gestural; emergent; and expressive; as signposts for a program of research into haptic interaction that could point the way towards novel approaches to haptic interaction and move us from optic to haptic ways of seeing.

Redisplacement by design

Recently, researchers have noted that traditional knowledge systems (TKSs) can inspire technology design. They have also noted that the interdependency between Aboriginal culture and “landscape” provides insight into an embodied approach to HCI [1]: People’s experience of place and construction of space does not separate the mind, the body, and the surroundings [2]. However, we notice that increased recognition of Aboriginal TKS is no easy panacea for the constraints on design prescribed by the way the “technology race” (pun intended) abstracts spaces. Instead, paradoxes for the cultural “localization” of technology, mentioned in previous columns in this series, emerge from complex power relations between TKSs and dominant knowledge.

Cross-cultural web user interface design for Indigenous internet users

This project investigated 1) Australian web designers’ cultural perceptions towards Australian Indigenous users and 2) Australian Indigenous cultural features in terms of user interface design. In doing so, it reviews the literature of cross-cultural user interface design by focusing on feasible models and arguments to articulate and integrate Australian Indigenous Internet users’ cultural needs of web user interface. The online survey results collected from 101 Indigenous users and 126 Web designers showed a distinctive difference between them on the integration of Indigenous users' cultural in Web sites. The interview data collected from 14 Indigenous users and 14 web designers suggested practical approaches to the design implications of Indigenous culture.

Exploring mediated interactions : a design exercise

With the emergence of personal and ubiquitous computing systems in the last decade, interaction designers have started designing products by employing quality oriented aspects such as user experience, playfulness, enchantment and others. In order to explore novel forms of mediated interactions, designers need to focus beyond the basic user requirements and usability issues. We present a procedure and results of a design exercise that we carried out with students of a master's course on Visual Design. Our intention was to explore new forms of mediated interaction by using a specific design exercise. We provide the details of the resulted design concepts and discuss the usefulness of our design exercise.

Design of a tangible data visualization

In this paper we describe the design of DNA Jewellery, which is a wearable tangible data representation of personal DNA profile data. An iterative design process was followed to develop a 3D form-language that could be mapped to standard DNA profile data, with the aim of retaining readability of data while also producing an aesthetically pleasing and unique result in the area of personalized design. The work explores design issues with the production of data tangibles, contributes to a growing body of research exploring tangible representations of data and highlights the importance of approaches that move between technology, art and design.

Culturally inclusive design in a multicultural society

Multiculturalism in design advocates that people's belief and cultures should be placed at the centre of design processes and designers should be capable of addressing cultural diversity in multiple ways of thinking. However, contemporary design discourses seem not to be philosophically inclusive and practically applicable in mulriculmral contexts. This paper theoretically reviews three predominant metaphysical conceptual thinking frameworks: Dualism, Monism and Holism in many multicultural societies and argue a possibility of the culturally inclusive design.

MiniOrb : a sensor interaction platform for indoor climate preferences [Extended Abstract]

We introduce the MiniOrb platform, a combined sensor and interaction platform built to understand and encourage the gathering of data around personal indoor climate preferences in office environments. The platform consists of a sensor device, gathering localised environmental data and an attached tangible interaction and ambient display device. This device allows users to understand their local environment and record preferences with regards to their preferred level of office comfort. In addition to the tangible device we built a web-based mobile application that allowed users to record comfort preferences through a different interface. This paper describes the design goals and technical setup of the MiniOrb platform.

Evaluating the use of ambient and tangible interaction approaches for personal indoor climate preferences [Extended Abstract]

In this paper we describe the preliminary results of a field study which evaluated the use of MiniOrb, a system that employs ambient and tangible interaction mechanisms to allow inhabitants of office environments to report on subjectively perceived office comfort levels. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of ubiquitous computing in the individual control of indoor climate and specifically answer the question to what extent ambient and tangible interaction mechanisms are suited for the task of capturing individual comfort preferences in a non-obtrusive manner. We outline the preliminary results of an in-situ trial of the system.