Abstract
Designing a television (TV) application for older adults presents specific challenges, especially when the issue is an application that aims to support volunteer activities which will benefit older adults. This article describes the design process and evaluation of an interactive high visual-fidelity prototype of an application for a TV set-top box, which aims to allow older adults to request, in a simple and quick way, help from a group of volunteers, in specific tasks such as small household maintenance. Concerning the user interface design, a set of specific guidelines were considered and applied in the development of a high visual-fidelity prototype. The result of this process was later evaluated in heuristic evaluation sessions and user testing. The former were supported by a list of heuristics, drawn from other lists used in recent research and adapted to the context of the study. The latter were conducted with potential users that tried to accomplish some tasks on the prototype. In a context in which several studies show that television is a highly privileged platform to provide information to the older adults population due to its high degree of use in this group, this project may present important contributions to better understand some of the challenges that are associated with the design and early evaluation of TV applications whose target audience is older adults and some good practices that should be followed to achieve a product that is easy and enjoyable for this public to use.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Silva, T., Abreu, J., Antunes, M., Almeida, P., Silva, V., Santinha, G.: +TV4E: interactive television as a support to push information about social services to the elderly. In: Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies, CENTERIS, pp. 1–6 (2016)
Instituto Nacional de Estatística: Censos 2011: Resultados Definitivos - Portugal, Lisboa, Portugal (2012)
Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social: As novas dinâmicas do consumo audiovisual em Portugal 2016, Lisboa (2016)
Marktest Group: Portugueses viram cerca de 3h30m de Tv em 2010. http://www.marktest.com/wap/a/n/id~16e0.aspx
Ribeiro, V.S., Martins, A.I., Queirós, A., Silva, A.G., Rocha, N.P.: Usability evaluation of a health care application based on IPTV. Procedia Comput. Sci. 64, 635–642 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.08.577
Portet, F., Vacher, M., Golanski, C., Roux, C., Meillon, B.: Design and evaluation of a smart home voice interface for the elderly: acceptability and objection aspects. Pers. Ubiquit. Comput. 17, 127–144 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0470-5
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H.: Beyond Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. Wiley, New York (2015)
Lee, C., Coughlin, J.F.: Perspective: older adults’ adoption of technology: an integrated approach to identifying determinants and barriers. J. Prod. Innov. Manag. 32, 747–759 (2014)
Righi, V., Sayago, S., Blat, J.: When we talk about older people in HCI, who are we talking about? Towards a “turn to community” in the design of technologies for a growing ageing population. Int. J. Hum Comput Stud. 108, 15–31 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2017.06.005
Silva, P.A., Holden, K., Jordan, P.: Towards a list of heuristics to evaluate smartphone apps targeted at older adults: a study with apps that aim at promoting health and well-being. In: Proceedings Annual Hawaii International Conference System Science, March 2015, pp. 3237–3246 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2015.390
Molich, R., Nielsen, J.: Improving a human-computer dialogue. Commun. ACM 33, 338–348 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1145/77481.77486
Nielsen, J., Molich, R.: Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Empowering People - CHI 1990, pp. 249–256. ACM Press, New York (1990)
Chorianopoulos, K.: User interface design principles for interactive television applications. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact. 24, 556–573 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1080/10447310802205750
Pak, R., McLaughlin, A.: Designing Displays for Older Adults. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2010)
Nunes, F., Kerwin, M., Silva, P.A.: Design recommendations for TV user interfaces for older adults: findings from the eCAALYX project. In: Proceedings 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference Computer Access. - ASSETS 2012, p. 41 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2384916.2384924
Van Barneveld, J., Van Setten, M.: Designing usable interfaces for TV recommender systems. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, 259–286 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2164-X_10
Nielsen, J.: How to conduct a heuristic evaluation. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-to-conduct-a-heuristic-evaluation/
Acknowledgments
The research leading to this work received funding from AlticeLabs@UA. The authors would like to thank the support provided by the National Association of Gerontologists (Associação Nacional de Gerontólogos - ANG) for their contribution to this paper and for the collaboration in this research in general.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ribeiro, T., Santos, R., Moura, J., Martins, A.I., Caravau, H. (2018). Application for Older Adults to Ask for Help from Volunteers Through Television: Design and Evaluation of a High Visual-Fidelity Prototype. In: Abásolo, M., Abreu, J., Almeida, P., Silva, T. (eds) Applications and Usability of Interactive Television. jAUTI 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 813. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90170-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90170-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90169-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90170-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)