How to Assess the Usability of Social Media Platform for Elderly Users
There is an increasing number of elder people using electronic devices and social media platforms. But how to design an appropriate social media application for this age group? In A Usability Study on Elder Adults Utilizing Social Networking Sites, Jessica Arfaa and Yuanqiong Wang conducted a series of usability evaluations on a social media platform prototype, which are of considerable referential importance, identifying a few accessibility and usability problems experienced by elders and suggesting several improvement measures.
The research included 22 participants aged 65 and above and equally separated into two groups based on their computer experience. Three steps were taken for evaluation, which were:
To get participants involved in the social media platform usage and observe how they react with the platform, a series of tasks were designed in six groups, and every task was further defined by several subtasks.
The research came to a few interesting findings. Problems experienced by all the participants included text that was too small (36%), lack of contrasting text and background colors (50%), and difficulties understanding the layout and navigation (68%). And in terms of layout, the elders preferred clustered information with fewer options. It was surprising that less experienced computer users had more social networking site profiles and the majority of them felt more comfortable with the tasks compared to the more experienced users. Moreover, many of them were eager to learn about computer and social media, however did not have someone to teach them.
Reference
Arfaa J., Wang Y.. (2014) A Usability Study on Elder Adults Utilizing Social Networking Sites. In: Marcus A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability. User Experience Design for Diverse Interaction Platforms and Environments. DUXU 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07626-3_5
