Designing Mobile Phone Interfaces for Age Diversity in South Africa: “One-World” versus Diverse “Islands”

Abstract

Abstract.Designing for diversity is a laudable aim. How to achieve this, in the context of mobile phone usage by South African seniors, is a moot point. We considered this question from two possible perspectives: universal (one-world) versus focused design (designing for diverse "islands" of users). Each island would be characterised by a measure of relative homogeneity in terms of user interface needs. Our particular focus in this paper is age diversity. The universal approach attempts to deliver a design that can be all things to all peoplemeeting the needs of all users within one user interface. The islander approach delivers specific and different designs for islands within a diverse world. To determine which the best approach would be, in the South African context, we dispatched a team of student researchers to interview participants from an older generation, on a one-to-one basis. It was beneficial to deploy aspiring designers to carry out this research because we wanted to confront aspiring researchers with the differences between their own and other generations' usage of, and attitudes towards, mobile phones. Our study found that there were indeed significant age-related differences in mobile phone usage. Our research delivered insights that led to a model of the factors impacting mobile phone usage of the senior generation as a series of filters between the user and their device. We conclude that the island approach is more suitable for age-specific design. This approach might well become less fitting as a more technologically experienced population ages, but at present there is a clear need for an agesensitive mobile interface design.

A Mobile Interface for the Older User

“…Afterwards, many subsequent studies [2,4,5,9,11,14,17,20,21,[26][27][28][29] have extracted this user group's requirements about the mobile phone usage which can be summarised as follows.…”

“…Due to difficulties experienced by older users some manufacturers have simply reduced the functionality on their socalled senior phones. This reduction in functionality also seems to stem from an assumption that members of this user group cannot understand a rich feature-filled interface [4,5] and have reduced functionality needs as compared to other user groups [4].…”

Usability Study of Smart Phone Messaging for Elderly and Low-literate Users

“…The mobile manufacturing companies are developing mobile layout according to the trend to do commercialized their product. No one is considering the Elderly Citizens, what interface will give them comfort to use the device [26]. As a result, there is a big number of people in our society who are Elderly and try to avoid using smartphones [27][28][29].…”

Uniformity in the midst of diversity

“…Researchers also increasingly argue that the specific requirements of the older user need to be considered during the design process (Gelderblom et al, 2010;Leung et al, 2009;Neves and Amaro, 2012;Renaud et al, 2013;Renaud and Van Biljon, 2010). Thus far, most age-related studies have been carried out within a single country, or have not considered the participant's country of residence, ignoring the wider context of use (Dourish, 2004).…”

“…When considering mobile phone usage by older users in developed or developing countries, the question is: should mobile phone design be country-specific, generation-specific or both? In a recent publication the authors argued for an age-specific mobile phone design ("island" being preferable to "one-world" design) (Renaud et al, 2013).…”