TapTag: Assistive Gestural Interactions in Social Media on Touchscreens for Older Adults

Older adults want to live independently and at the same time stay socially active. We conducted contextual inquiry to understand what usability problems they face while interacting with social media on touch screen devices. We found that it is hard for active older adults to understand and learn mobile social media interfaces due to lack of support of safe interface exploration and insufficient cognitive affordances. We designed TapTag to enhance the learnability for older adults on touch screens. TapTag is an assistive gestural interaction model that utilizes muti-step single taps. TapTag breaks the interaction process to 2 steps, one gesture is to explore the user interface (UI), and the second is to activate the functionality of the UI element. We prototyped TapTag as an overlay on the top of Facebook app. We conducted a comparative study where older adults used Facebook app and Facebook with TapTag. The results showed that Facebook with TapTag provided a better user experience for older adults in terms of learnability, accessibility, and ease of use.

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