OBJECTIVE: Mobile-based interventions have the potential to promote healthy aging among older adults. However, the adoption and use of mobile health applications are often low due to inappropriate designs. The aim of this systematic review is to identify, synthesize, and report interface and persuasive feature design recommendations of mobile health applications for elderly users to facilitate adoption and improve health-related outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We searched PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Scopus databases to identify studies that discussed and evaluated elderly-friendly interface and persuasive feature designs of mobile health applications using an elderly cohort. RESULTS: We included 74 studies in our analysis. Our analysis revealed a total of 9 elderly-friendly interface design recommendations: 3 recommendations were targeted at perceptual capabilities of elderly users, 2 at motor coordination problems, and 4 at cognitive and memory deterioration. We also compiled and reported 5 categories of persuasive features: reminders, social features, game elements, personalized interventions, and health education. DISCUSSION: Only 5 studies included design elements that were based on theories. Moreover, the majority of the included studies evaluated the application as a whole without examining end-user perceptions and the effectiveness of each single design feature. Finally, most studies had methodological limitations, and better research designs are needed to quantify the effectiveness of the application designs rigorously. CONCLUSIONS: This review synthesizes elderly-friendly interface and persuasive feature design recommendations for mobile health applications from the existing literature and provides recommendations for future research in this area and guidelines for designers.

The internationalization of Web sites requires Web designers to provide effective navigation experience for users from diverse cultural backgrounds. This research investigates the effect of cultural cognitive style on user perception of Web site structure characteristics and performance on the Web site, and the subsequent user satisfaction towards the Web site. More specifically, the authors focus on the breadth versus depth of a Web site's structure. A laboratory experiment involving participants from China and the United States was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results showed that cultural cognitive style and Web site structure indeed interact to affect user perception and performance. People with holistic and analytic cultural cognitive styles displayed different perceived navigability and user performance on “broad” and “deep” Web sites. This study adds a cultural dimension to our knowledge on how Web site structure can affect users' experience. It also suggests pragmatic strategies for Web site design practitioners to improve website design in order to produce compelling navigation experience for users from diverse cultures.

Research on ontology and conceptual data modeling builds on the premise that the world could be represented in terms of concepts (also known as “things”), their properties and their (things') relationships. A persistent effort in the representation is how to distinguish things from their properties, as well as how to denote relationships that relate two things together. Following the tradition of deriving guidelines from ontology studies, this paper proposes a need to make a clear distinction between relationships among things and relationships among things' properties. The central thrust of this paper is in proposing an ontologically guided principle: For the same relationship, working with the relationship among things will lead to better user performance than working with the relationship among things' properties. This principle, called Relationship without Pointers principle, is robustly validated by re-analyzing a set of experiment data on user data modeling performance with three database models. This principle may be applicable to other contexts that study relationships.

Scholars and practitioners alike increasingly emphasize the importance of the virtual world as a new medium of communication. Key to the success of this digital medium is its ability to support information exchange when compared with face‐to‐face communication. Its potential is highlighted by the literature illustrating the inadequacy of traditional computer‐mediated communication (CMC) tools, such as e‐mail and video conferencing, to support communication among geographically dispersed coworkers. Many of the traditional CMC tools lack the needed support for effective information exchange to varying degrees. The emergence of a sophisticated virtual world, such as Second Life, has met this dearth. We draw on the theories of task closure and media richness to propose a parsimonious model of information exchange behavior in a virtual world context. Observations from a series of group‐based project discussion sessions in face‐to‐face and virtual world settings, respectively, suggest that the information exchange between coworkers in both settings could be similar. Specifically, virtual coworkers might be able to achieve task closure (i.e., the complete transmission of intended work‐related information) in the same way as their counterparts in the face‐to‐face context.

The technology acceptance model (TAM) is very widely used for studying technology acceptance. The model states that an individual's behavioral intention (BI) to use an information system is determined by his perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of it. While many studies have applied the TAM, none has examined the model's behavior over its entire value range. We conducted two surveys to examine the values of BI over the two-dimensional boundary space formed by PU and PEOU. Contrary to current understanding, we find that the effects of PU and PEOU vary over the boundary space.

Abstract Recent studies have found organizational learning capacity to be a key factor in influencing organizational assimilation and exploitation of knowledge‐intensive innovations. Despite its increasing importance, the impact of organizational learning capacity on technology assimilation is not well understood. Distilling from extant works on organizational learning and technology assimilation, this study identifies four components of organizational learning capacity, namely, systems orientation, organizational climate for learning orientation, knowledge acquisition and utilization orientation, and information sharing and dissemination orientation. The authors subject these components to structural equation modeling analyses to better understand their structure and dimensionality. The analyses strongly support the proposed four major dimensions underlying organizational learning capacity. Organizational learning capacity, as a higher‐order factor, has a significant impact on attitude towards organizational adoption of knowledge‐intensive innovations. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

Abstract End‐user computing has become a well‐established aspect of enterprise database systems today. End‐user computing performance depends on the user–database interface, in which the data model and query language are major components. We examined three prominent data models—the relational model, the Extended‐Entity‐Relationship (EER) model, and the Object‐Oriented (OO) model—and their query languages in a rigorous and systematic experiment to evaluate their effects on novice end‐user computing performance in the context of database design and data manipulation. In addition, relationships among the performances for different tasks (modeling, query writing, query comprehension) were postulated with the use of a cognitive model for the query process, and are tested in the experiment. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques were used to examine the multiple causal relationships simultaneously. The findings indicate that the EER and OO models overwhelmingly outperformed the relational model in terms of accuracy for both database design and data manipulation. The associations between tasks suggest that data modeling techniques would enhance query writing correctness, and query writing ability would contribute to query comprehension. This study provides a better and thorough understanding of the inter‐relationships among these data modeling and task factors. Our findings have significant implications for novice end‐user training and development.