Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 3, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 11, 2023
Design Guidelines of Mobile Applications for Older Adults: Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mobile applications are a fundamental tool in today’s society for practical and social endeavors. These technologies, nonetheless, are often not usable for older users. Given the increased usage of mobile applications by this group of users, and the impact that certain services may have on their quality of life, such as, mobile health, personal finance or online administrative procedures, a clear set of guidelines for mobile app designers is needed. The existing recommendations for older adults focus on investigations with certain groups of older adults or have not been extracted from experimental results.
Objective:
This article systematically reviews scientific literature that provides recommendations for the design of mobile applications based on usability testing with older adults, and organizes such recommendations into a meaningful set of design guidelines.
Methods:
We conducted a systematic literature review of journal and conference articles from 2010-2021. We included articles that carried out usability tests with populations aged 60+ years old and present transferable guidelines on mobile software design, which resulted in a final set of 41 articles. Then, we carried out a thematic analysis that led to 28 guidelines.
Results:
Among the 28 resulted guidelines, the ‘simplify’ and ‘increase the size and distance between interactive controls’ rules are transversal and of greatest significance. The rest of the guidelines are divided into five categories (help and training, navigation, visual design, cognitive load, and interaction) and consequent subcategories in visual design (font, layout, icons, appearance) and interaction (input and output). The recommendations are structured, explained in detail, and contextualized with relevant studies.
Conclusions:
The compiled guidelines support UX design of mobile applications that caters to the needs of older adults.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.