Abstract
Online Social Networking (OSN) has become one of the biggest successes of the Internet. Facebook is the most popular service with over 800 million users. OSN have the potential to combat feelings of social isolation amongst the aging population. This study has investigated how people with differing levels of experience using OSN, within different age categories, are able to interact with the core features of Facebook. The goal has been to identify concessions and produce guidelines for designing an OSN for older people. This paper presents quantitative findings from a usability study which utilized eye tracking to observe 20 users’ interactions with Facebook. The usability issues that were encountered and how these may be addressed to help older people with social isolation are discussed.
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Boyd, K., Nugent, C., Donnelly, M., Sterritt, R., Bond, R. (2012). A Usability Protocol for Evaluating Online Social Networks. In: Donnelly, M., Paggetti, C., Nugent, C., Mokhtari, M. (eds) Impact Analysis of Solutions for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management. ICOST 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7251. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30779-9_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30779-9_30
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