1. Research Question
Understanding elderly people's behavior toward adapting to smart-phones.
2. Research plan
- Method : Qualitative research from
Interview and Observation from Tasks given to them.
- Target crowd : Semi literate Elderly people
- Age group : 40 - 60 years old
- Location : Gandhinagar
3. Secondary Research
Following secondary research data is collected from these sources
-Android headlines by Kristijan Lucic.
-Research paper on Motivation and obstacles to smartphone use by the elderly by Ronald E. McGaughey, Steven M. Zeltmann and Mark E. McMurtrey.
-Smartphones offer great potential in improving the quality of life for elderly people in the areas of healthcare, independent living, connection/communication to family etc.
-Largely elderly uses smartphones for making calls, texts.
-Rarely elderly uses smartphones for email, tae pictures, internet, video/movies, news, other app.
-Elderly people are uncomfortable with computer technology.
-Design of software/hardware in smartphones is not elderly people friendly.
-Smartphones are designed for younger users who grew up playing high tech, surfing the internet.
-Elderly have different physical and cognitive ability than young.
-The small device size, small keys, touch, navigation control, user interface -hard to use and appeal to elderly.
-Lack of motivation in elderly people.
-Complexity, small size, cost, useless, distracting, harmful, can't learn, menu travel, interest, not growing with tech- non experience with computing, lack of confidence are other factors which can be the reason for elderly people not to adapt smartphones.
4. Semi structured interview
-Name, age, education, occupation details about a person.
-Have smartphone? Since when?
-How did they buy smartphone?
-What tasks do they perform regularly?
-Ask them to perform these tasks
Tasks to give
1 take picture
2 use whatsapp - sending text, photo, contact
3 saving contact
4 web browsing
5 knowledge about reset phone
-Which mobile do they prefer keypad or touch?
-How did they learn to use smartphone?
-Smartphones are good or landline was enough?
-Any difficulties they face regarding smartphone use?
-Do they forget menu transaction if learned from someone
-Small size, UI, cost is affecting them by any means?
-Are they interested if there is teaching campaign for smartphone use?
-Which is the most liked app for them?
5. Analysis
Key insights
-Mostly encouraged for buying smartphone by younger people.
From the interviews most of the elderly people bought their smartphone through reference of their relatives or friends who are young people and are already using smartphones. Some of them are encouraged to buy a smartphone because these young people wants them to use smartphone features and some of the elderly people sees the feature and want to use these features for their own interest.
-Can do normal tasks, they learnt because these are necessary tasks.
Every smartphone using elderly people knows basic task like calling messaging using whatsapp capturing pictures saving contacts. And they learnt these task because these tasks are necessary for every user to start with smartphone . more complicated tasks like some difficult menu transaction, factory data reset can not be performed because they have not learnt it or there is less necessity of these tasks.
-Learnt from younger people or colleagues.
They learnt to use smartphone from younger people or colleagues who already learnt from younger people
-Enthusiast for learning only for their interest tasks.
Elderly people are enthusiastic about learning new features on smartphones ,but not every function. They want to learn features only of their interest. As I met one person he was enthusiastic about learning new features about voice typing and hindi writing because this features can be used in his day to day tasks and he has an interest in learning these tasks , but he was not interested in learning other camera features rather than taking simple picture.
-Always struggling for finding perfect menu transaction.
Even though they know to perform the task they do struggle to perform the task.
-Forgets what they learnt about menu transaction.
When there is more menu transaction to perform any task they forgets the menu transaction even though they learn it.
-Can not perform difficult tasks like resetting phone.
Resetting phone requires knowledge of they can perform factory data reset and most of them did not know about it or do not know what is the menu transaction for performing data reset.
-Not necessity but bought for their business purpose.
Some of the person has no interest in using smartphones but because of some features like whatsapp, handling money with smartphone etc are used in their business, they bought a smartphone .
-Some of them like productivity of smartphone and happy to use that function.
After knowing smartphone features productivity sight they are very much interested in using these features like using paytm for paying bills and money transfer, for image recognition and without being present at the location one can send image or video call they can see it instantly ,umang application for their salary and land detail etc.
-Can't learn more then visually known tasks without any assistance.
At the first who were learning on their own they are able to learn only some of the tasks by visual icon representation they know by their past experience or which is very common representation of the task. As example call dial green icon , call reject red button, camera icon etc.
-Perfect size would be good to handle and store in pocket according to them.
Sizes of the smartphone varies very much nowadays according to the usage of screen and viewing contents at better ration, but for elderly this is totally different , they want the size of the smartphone as it should be good to handle and can be fit in pocket.
-Some of application shows unnecessary advertisement which they can not understand and sees it as virus threat
There are many applications available in smartphone platform and are easily available to download, but some time some application creates advertisement which is totally unrelated to application. Elderly people think it as potential virus threat and does not know how to remove it. Sometimes they end up doing hard reset at the mobile shop just because they think it as virus.especially advertisement which is shown outside of application as in home screen.]
-Other than needed task they use smartphones for entertainment purpose only, few are using it for some reasons like shopping, paying bills, knowing account details, etc.
6. Design direction
-They do recognise and it's easy to recognise some of the app by visual appearance of the app icon. So for elderly it is better to use simple and recognizable or relatable icon appearance.
-Pocket friendly size is necessity for elderly people and they do not require screen usage complexity. So the size measurement according to it can be kept in pocket should be prioritised.
-Structure of application interface should be made according they don't find advertisements as virus threat. And which advertisement is related to which application is made known.
-Menu transactions needs to be improvised as simple as possible so that transactions between menu is not forgettable when they try even once.
-More video tutorials for default applications use should be introduced in smartphone as tutorials.there should be more and easy way to access these tutorials.
-Motivation for productive application should be introduced as it is easily connected to elderly and they can get motivated to use it. Like there are so many applications which can reduce the time and make the task easily possible sitting in the home also.for usage of these kind of application there is need of motivation.
