HelpMe: Assisting Older Adults in Performing Tasks on Mobile Devices

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CHI’17, May 6-11, 2017, Denver, USA Workshop on Designing Mobile Interactions for the Ageing Populations Abstract Although mobile devices are becoming more ubiquitous, older adults have trouble catching up with the dynamics of technological innovation in smartphones. Most custom solutions for them rely on a proprietary UI with an extenuated number of interaction possibilities. While these solutions do help with basic tasks such as calling the right person, many of the benefits of having a smartphone are clearly dislodged. We introduce and evaluate a prototype, HelpMe, for older adult users who want to use more demanding Apps without external assistance. Through a prestudy we uncovered a set of behaviors that imply that the user needs assistance. By detecting these behaviors or by manual request, HelpMe overlays information that explain to the user what can be done on the current screen and what the different UI symbols resemble. We evaluated HelpMe in a subsequent study where we collected feedback and measured the workload. Our findings show that older adult users would benefit from HelpMe, and that it reduces the perceived workload.