The cognition of the elderly on the icons of smart phones

Abstract

This paper is about how the elderly in Taiwan think when it comes to interacting with the icons on the smart devices. It is concerned that whether the icons on the smart devices nowadays are suitable for elderly people. To examine how it works, there can be categorized into two types: the abstract icons and the non-abstract icons. Due to the research, the elderly seems to be more familiar with the non-abstract icons rather than the abstract ones. Therefore, as the result from the interview, one reason shows that there seems to be some difficulties on recognizing the abstract icons for the reason that they cannot have well connection with the metaphysical meaning of the icon although they can tell the things after being informed. Another reason might be that these icons are mostly designed by the western designers rather than by the eastern designers. Therefore, under such circumstances, the cognition of itself could be varied from culture to culture. With different cultural backgrounds, there could be various explanations and cognitions on the same thing. This paper had observed and could help to know the feeling of what the elderly from Taiwan think of these modern icons used on smart devices.