Complexity versus page hierarchy of a GUI for elderly homecare applications

Abstract

Using computerized devices comes quite natural for many users due to the various graphical user interfaces. However, acceptability of graphical user interfaces by elderly, a rapidly growing group of computer users, is a challenging issue due to different levels of impairments experienced. In the literature, providing simplicity is the main focus of the studies that try to address this challenge. In this paper, we study the acceptance of graphical user interfaces for elderly people with different impairments in the context of in-home healthcare systems. We focus on the relation between two main design parameters of a graphical user interface: page complexity, which is the number of interface elements on each page and the page hierarchy, which is the number of the pages to be traced in order to complete a task. For this purpose, we designed two versions of an interface: one version has a high page complexity and the other version is designed to have a high page hierarchy. We asked 18 experiment-subjects, aged between 65 and 95, to complete three tasks, using both versions. Experiment results are evaluated using both objective and subjective metrics. Results show that the flat version is found to be more acceptable by elderly. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.