Abstract
The age group of 65 years has been described as the fastest growing demographic in the world. As life expectancy increases, older adults prefer to remain independent at home. Smart Home systems and Assistive Technologies have been developed to enable older adults to live in their own homes as they age, enhancing safety, independence and quality of life. Although considerable Smart Home mobile applications exist focused on older adult’s wellbeing, they still face considerable challenges in usability, feasibility and accessibility regarding design of interfaces. There is a gap in recent research on evaluation of User Interface (UI) designed or adapted to address older adults needs and abilities. The main objective of the paper is to show findings of a Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics) of an age-friendly smart home application which is a part of an ongoing project. Experts identified the potential usability problems through task analysis that could impact the experience of older adults as they interact with the UIs. Afterwards, the experts identified violated heuristics and estimated severity rating for each violation. The results showed that 80 usability problems found, 8 out of 10 heuristics were violated, and 78 violations were encountered. However, only 3% of the problems were considered catastrophic and it must be a high priority to fix them. It is concluded that findings should be supported with more experts and target user testing to provide insights to designers and developers to create more usable interfaces to address the needs and abilities of the older adults.
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Acknowledgement
The study was supported by UNIDCOM under a grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) No. UIDB/00711/2020 attributed to UNIDCOM – Unidade de Investigação em Design e Comunicação, Lisbon, Portugal. The study was also partially supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicações and funded by FCT/MCTES through national funds and when applicable co-funded EU funds under the project UIDB/EEA/50008/2020.
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Marques da Silva, A., Ayanoglu, H., Silva, B.M.C. (2020). An Age-Friendly System Design for Smart Home: Findings from Heuristic Evaluation. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers: Universal Access and Inclusive Design. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12426. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60149-2_48
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