The kind of technology (tech) support that older adults prefer during continued mobile use varies widely. So does the perceived quality of that support. However, we know little about what influences these preferences and perceptions. We conducted an online survey with 138 U.S. older adults to understand how mobile device proficiency and feelings of anxiety and confidence during mobile use impact the preference for and perception of mobile tech support in older adults. Proficiency predicted a positive preference for self-reliant support but a negative preference for social support during continued mobile tech use. The effects of proficiency and confidence on the perceived quality of self-reliant mobile tech support in older adults were partially mediated by a preference for it.

Despite the soaring rate of mobile device ownership among older adults, a common barrier to their continued mobile use is little to no tech support for learning or troubleshooting the complexities of mobile apps, features, and services. In this paper, using interviews (n = 23) and surveys (n = 259) with older adults, we develop and evaluate the mobile tech support questionnaire (MTSQ). MTSQ measures older adults’ preference for and perceived quality of support during continued mobile tech use. An exploratory factor analysis revealed two dimensions, helpful resources used on one’s own (self-reliant) and help from another person (social). Next, partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationship between preference, quality, frequency, and ease of use of mobile tech support. Both preference for and quality of a support type positively influenced how frequently older adults used that type of support and perceived its ease of use.

As mobile user interfaces (UI) become feature-rich, navigation gets more complex. Finding features quickly starts demanding information-intensive strategies for decision-making—which can be challenging for older adults. Older adults examine fewer details, requiring fewer cognitive resources, when searching for information with a large number of alternatives. In this paper, we first systematically examine various ways to convey a reduced feature space. Visually emphasizing three relevant options helped older adults find a specific feature more quickly—on par with younger adults. Older users were more efficient when options were highlighted along with their context or with a weighted zoom than when just highlighted, and they also preferred these two the most. We then present Nav Nudge, an interaction technique that uses voice input and large language models to visually reduce the feature search space on demand—and discuss how older adults use it within a mobile map application.

Older adults often struggle to locate a function quickly in feature-rich user interfaces (UIs). Mobile UIs not only pack a ton of features in a small screen but also get frequent updates to their visual layouts—thereby exacerbating the problem. This paper explores a design solution where users could search for a UI feature using spoken-word queries. We investigated: 1) what type of questions older users ask when facing interaction challenges in unfamiliar scenarios, 2) how those query types compare with younger users’ inquiries, and 3) how older adults use a voice assistant design probe in a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) study. Results reveal five query types when verbally articulating interaction issues: validation, directed and undirected informational, navigational, and conceptual. In the WoZ study, older users typically asked for help following a series of non-unique or off-task feature selections (n = 13/15), and in 77% of those instances, they completed the task in the next interaction.

Far more older adults are using mobile devices now than a decade ago. However, the applications they use continue to lag in depth (features) and breadth (diversity). Despite the large body of research on designing technology with older adults and identifying their adoption difficulties, we know little about how older users prefer to learn or troubleshoot mobile technology following an initial adoption and ownership. In this paper, we first review the existing models of technology adoption by older adults that consider learning as a factor and discuss their limitations. Then we interview older adults who use mobile technology (n = 23) and younger adults who help them (n = 17), to identify how older adults prefer to learn and troubleshoot nowadays. Our participants represent three different cultures, North American, South Asian, and Middle Eastern. Findings suggest that in addition to mobile device proficiency, older adults' technology identity---different from their attitude toward technology---determines their learning preferences. We identify two types of learning preferences: self-exploration and social learning, and two types of support, general and social. Social support plays a role in both social learning and learning by self-exploration. Finally, we propose the senior technology learning preferences model for mobile technology (STELE) to describe how different learning preferences and support types influence older adults' mobile technology acceptance and use.

Despite a global upward trend in mobile device ownership, older adults continue to use few applications and fewer features. For example, besides directions, maps provide information about public transit, traffic, and amenities. Mobile maps can assist older adults to navigate independently, avail city facilities, and explore new places. But how accessible are current mobile maps to older adults? In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study examining how older adults use mobile maps and the difficulties they encounter. 172 problems were identified and categorized across 17 older adults (ages 60+). Results indicate that non-motor issues were more difficult to mitigate than motor issues and led to maximum frustration and resignation. These non-motor issues stemmed from three factors, inadequate visual saliency, ambiguous affordances, and low information scent, making it difficult for older adults to notice, use, and infer, respectively. Two design solutions are proposed to address these non-motor issues.

As mobile applications continue to offer more features, tackling the complexity of mobile interfaces can become challenging for older adults. Owing to a small screen and frequent updates that modify the visual layouts of menus and buttons, older adults can find it challenging to locate a function on a mobile interface quickly—even when familiar with the application. To address this issue, we present a system that supports older adults to quickly locate an on-screen feature on a mobile interface using speech queries. Our system allows users to ask for a function related to the current mobile screen using voice input. When that function is available, it provides visual guidance for users to engage with the pertinent user interface (UI) widget. The label and location of all UI components on the current screen are acquired via the Android’s Assist API. We discuss four scenarios of use.

Sabita Acharya, Barbara Di Eugenio, Andrew Boyd, Richard Cameron, Karen Dunn Lopez, Pamela Martyn-Nemeth, Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Pantea Habibi, Carolyn Dickens, Haleh Vatani, Amer Ardati. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. 2019.

Traditional models of slideware assume one presenter controls attention through slide navigation and pointing while a passive audience views the action. This paradigm limits group interactions, curtailing opportunities for attendees to use slides to participate in a collaborative discourse. However, as slideware permeates contexts beyond simple one-to-many presentations, there are growing efforts to shift the dynamics of collocated interactions. Technologies exist to shift the one-to-many information control paradigm to variations that extend functions to multiple attendees. But there is limited detailed research on how to design such multi-person attentional control and facilitate collocated interactions without disrupting existing work practices. We report on a detailed naturalistic case of using presentation in a design meeting, where participants used Office Social, an experimental slideware technology that enabled open access to shared interaction with slides across multiple devices. We explore how the design of Office Social supported informal collaboration. Our video-based analysis reveals how the orderly structures of conversational turn-taking and bodily conduct were used in conjunction with the affordances of the socio-technical ecosystem to organize collective activity. We suggest that supporting collocated interactions should take account of the existing conversational methods for achieving orderly collaboration rather than superimposing prescriptive technological methods of order.

Drug–drug interaction (DDI) alerts safeguard patient safety during medication prescribing, but are often ignored by physicians. Despite attempts to improve the usability of such alerts, physicians still mistrust the relevance of simplistic computerized warnings to support complex medical decisions. By building on prior fieldwork, this paper evaluates novel designs of trust–eliciting cues in DDI alerts. A sequential mixed-method study with 70 physicians examined what trust cues improve compliance, promote reflection, and trigger appropriate actions. In a survey, 52 physicians rated the likelihood of compliance and usefulness of redesigned alerts. Based on these findings, alerts were assessed in a scenario-based simulation with 18 physicians prescribing medications in 6 patient scenarios. Our results show that alerts embodying expert endorsement, awareness of prior actions, and peer advice were less likely to be overridden than current alerts, and promoted reflection, monitoring, or order modifications—thus building towards greater attention to patient safety.

Slide presentations have long been stuck in a one-to-many paradigm, limiting audience engagement. Based on the concept of smartphone-based remote control of slide navigation, we present Office Social-a PowerPoint plugin and companion smartphone app that allows audience members qualified access to slides for personal review and, when the presenter enables it, public control over slide navigation. We studied the longitudinal use of Office Social across four meetings of a workgroup. We found that shared access and regulated control facilitated various forms of public and personal audience engagement. We discuss how enabling ad-hoc aggregation of co-proximate devices reduces 'interaction costs' and leads to both opportunities and challenges for presentation situations.

Safe prescribing of medications relies on drug safety alerts, but up to 96% of such warnings are ignored by physicians. Prior research has proposed improvements to the design of alerts, but with limited increase in adherence. We propose a different perspective: before re-designing alerts, we focus on improving the trust between physicians and computerized advice by examining why physicians trust their medical colleagues. To understand trusted advice among physicians, we conducted three contextual inquiries in a hospital setting (22 participants), and corroborated our findings with a survey (37 participants). Drivers that guide physicians in trusting peer advice include: timeliness of the advice, collaborative language, empathy, level of specialization and medical hierarchy. Based on these findings, we introduce seven design directions for trust-based alerts: endorsement, transparency, team sensing, collaborative, empathic, conflict mitigating and agency laden. Our work contributes to novel alert design strategies to improve the effectiveness of drug safety advice.

Markerless motion-sensing promises to position touchless interactions successfully in various domains (e.g., entertainment or surgery) because they are deemed natural. This naturalness, however, depends upon the mechanics of touchless interaction that remains largely unexplored. My dissertation first aims to deconstruct the interaction mechanics of touchless, especially its device-less property, from an embodied perspective. Grounded in this analysis, I then plan to investigate how visual perception affects touchless interaction with distant, 2D displays. Preliminary findings suggest that Gestalt principles in visual perception and motor action affect the touchless user experience. User interface elements demonstrating perceptual-grouping principles, such as similarity of orientation decreased users' efficiency, while continuity of UI elements forming a perceptual whole increased users' effectiveness. Moreover, following the law of Prägnanz, users often gestured to minimize their energy expenditure. This work can inform the design of touchless UX by uncovering relations between perceptual and motor gestalt in touchless interactions.

Elicitation and evaluation studies investigated intuitiveness of touchless gestures but did not operationalize intuitiveness. For example, studies found that users fail to make accurate 3D strokes as interaction commands. But this phenomenon remains unexplained. In this paper, we first explain how making accurate 3D strokes is generally unintuitive, because it exceeds our sensorimotor knowledge. We then introduce motor-intuitive, touchless interaction that uses sensorimotor knowledge by relying on image schemas. Specifically, we propose an interaction primitive—mid-air, directional strokes—based on space schemas up–down and left–right. In a controlled study with large displays, we found that biomechanical factors affected directional strokes. Strokes were efficient (0.2 s) and effective (12.5|$^{\circ }$| angular error), but affected by directions and length. Our work operationalized intuitive touchless interaction using the continuum of knowledge in intuitive interaction, and demonstrated how user performance of a motor-intuitive, touchless primitive based on sensorimotor knowledge (image schemas) is affected by biomechanical factors.

Researchers are exploring touchless interactions in diverse usage contexts. These include interacting with public displays, where mouse and keyboards are inconvenient, activating kitchen devices without touching them with dirty hands, or supporting surgeons in browsing medical images in a sterile operating room. Unlike traditional visual interfaces, however, touchless systems still lack a standardized user interface language for basic command selection (e.g., menus). Prior research proposed touchless menus that require users to comply strictly with system-defined postures (e.g., grab, finger-count, pinch). These approaches are problematic because they are analogous to command-line interfaces: users need to remember an interaction vocabulary and input a pre-defined symbol (via gesture or command). To overcome this problem, we introduce and evaluate Touchless Circular Menus (TCM)---a touchless menu system optimized for large displays, which enables users to make simple directional movements for selecting commands. TCM utilize our abilities to make mid-air directional strokes, relieve users from learning posture-based commands, and shift the interaction complexity from users' input to the visual interface. In a controlled study (N=15), when compared with contextual linear menus using grab gestures, participants using TCM were more than two times faster in selecting commands and perceived lower workload. However, users made more command-selection errors with TCM than with linear menus. The menu's triggering location on the visual interface significantly affected the effectiveness and efficiency of TCM. Our contribution informs the design of intuitive UIs for touchless interactions with large displays.