Design of Interactive Tutorials on Mobile Applications for Chinese Middle-Aged and Older Adults

Abstract

With the rapid speed of development for information technology in China, Chinese middle-aged and older adults benefit from various of mobile applications and services. However, most of them have difficulty to learn to use these mobile technologies. Thus, the goal of research is to design an interactive tutorial for middle-aged and older adults, which can adapt to existing applications. By conducting a survey to investigate their requirements for smartphone mobile applications tutorials and doing empirical analysis of the survey, we designed “Help Center”, which solves the problems we found from the survey study: 1) by implementing a fixed FAB (Floating Action Button) button as the access of help feature, the problem that users “can’t find the help features in a mobile application” is solved; 2) by implementing a PIP (picture in picture) tutorial, which allows users to do operations while watching the instructions, the problem that users “can remember nothing but easy instructions of on-boarding tutorials” is solved; 3) “learning center” feature solves the problem that users “don’t know how to express the problems that they are facing with”; 4) “icons and features” feature solves the recurrent problem of users “feeling confused with the meanings of icons and features”.