Impact of prior knowledge and computer interface organization in information searching performances: A study comparing younger and older web users

Abstract

The present study addressed age-related differences in performance to find information by older and younger web users. More precisely, we determined the impact of prior domain knowledge (high level vs low level) of older and younger adults and the interface organization (taxonomical-HS vs tag-based organization-TBS) on information search performance. The main results showed that older users exhibited poorer information searching performance than the younger users only for Manga domain (for which the younger users had higher level of knowledge than the older ones). For the two domains, the TBS interface decreased age-related differences in performance. In contrast, the HS interface generated lower performances for the older adults in the two domains, especially faced to Manga domain in which older users had very lower performances than younger users. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.