Difficulties on Small-Touch-Screens for Various Ages

Digital products with small-touch-screens are increasingly affecting daily life, and most especially that of the elderly population in Taiwan which, at present, is over 9.9%. As people age, they find it increasingly difficult to operate digital products with small-touch-screens. The main purpose of this study was to investigate and categorize these difficulties for three groups of adult users. The fifteen participants in the investigation were classified into three groups: young adults, middle-aged adults and elderly adults. All of the adults were requested to accomplish different tasks using three digital products with small-touch-screens and then to provide their opinions on the kinds of difficulties they had encountered. The experts classifying the results found that the elderly adults were the group confronted with the most difficulties in the operation of small-touch-screen digital devices. In the digital dictionary experiment, the greatest difficulty for the three groups centered on cognitive ability; the majority of problems were related to motion in the PDA. In fact, the most notable problems for each of the participants were related primarily to motion in the PDA and to cognition. The results also indicated the common operational problems with the three digital products with small-touch-screens, including the impact of space or position of handwriting and button size on motion ability; and the impact of the size and color of the fonts or icons and screen brightness on perception ability. Lastly, regarding the difficulties with cognition, most of the participants were confronted with complex information, inconsistent with the interfaces of the digital products. Results of this study were based on the opinions from the three adult groups and, could be used in future designs for small-touch-screen interfaces.