How does age impact in-vehicle touchscreen performance?

Abstract

Touchscreens are becoming commonplace in the modern-day vehicle, meaning they need to be accessible to all users, young or old. An experiment was conducted to understand the impact of age-related decline on touchscreen task performance when driving where users were asked to complete a simple touchscreen task in both a stationary (static) and moving (dynamic) condition. As expected, a significant decrease in task performance was found when comparing the static condition to a dynamic one. However, when analysing these two conditions by age, only the dynamic condition produced a significant decrease. A positive moderate correlation was also found in both conditions. This result has implications for the design of in-vehicle touchscreen systems to be inclusive of users of different ages and provides insight about the impact of when tasks are carried out in the vehicle.