Improving Smartphone Reading Experience for Middle-Aged and Elderly Users: The Effect of Font Size, Line Spacing and Stroke Weight

Abstract

Aging and digitization are two major trends in modern society, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of middle-aged and elderly smartphone users. Research into these user’s mobile reading experience has significant value in industry application, as well as social value. Based on the subjective experience evaluation and eye movement data of 60 Chinese adults aged 50–70 years, we investigated the impact of different font sizes, line spacing, and stroke weight on the smartphone reading experience of Chinese characters in three typical scenarios: searching, overview reading, and long-text reading. Results show that font size has a significant impact on reading experience in all scenarios. Line spacing and stroke weight have different impacts in different reading scenarios. Line spacing has a significant effect on long-text reading (such as the news details page), while stroke weight has a significant impact on search scenarios (such as news headlines). Bold type fonts can highlight key information on a page with multiple levels of information. This study also identifies the optimal font size, line spacing and stroke weight for different scenarios and different levels of information. This is the first study that provides smartphone application developers with design specifications for optimal font size, line spacing and stroke weight in different scenarios for middle-aged and elderly Chinese users. These findings can be utilized to improve the reading experience of Chinese news apps in a comprehensive manner.