The effects of cognitive ageing on use of complex interfaces

Abstract

This paper discusses an experiment investigating the effects of cognitive ageing and prior-experience with technology on using complex interfaces intuitively. Overall 37 participants, between the ages of 18 to 83, participated in this study. All participants were assessed for their cognitive abilities and prior-experience with technology. It was anticipated that the Central Executive function (a component of Working Memory) would emerge as one of the important cognitive functions in using complex interfaces. This was found to be the case with the strongest negative correlation occurring between sustained attention (one of the functions of the Central Executive), the time to complete the task and number of errors made by the participants.

Ageing, Technology Anxiety and Intuitive Use of Complex Interfaces

“…This decision was based on observing the increasing use of touch-based interfaces for consumer products. The mediator interface for this experiment was designed based on research [29,30] that suggested that there was a significant negative correlation between visuospatial sketchpad capacity and time to complete the task and the number of errors. The number of controls in the mediator product for this experiment was kept at 5, to keep it within the visuospatial sketchpad capacity of an average older participant [31,32] .…”

Physicality quantitative evaluation method

“…Another related study is a series of works by Blackler et al (2010aBlackler et al ( , 2010b, Lawry et al (2010) and Reddy et al (2010) who empirically evaluated the major effects of cognitive abilities and technology familiarity on the intuitiveness of interaction with electronic devices. However, they focused on the factors of user age and prior experience, and the appearance of the products while not addressing the physicality.…”

“…These are application-specific, invisible, inseparable and integrated parts of real-life objects normally performing real-time functionalities (Jozwiak et al, 2010;Malinowski and Hao, 2011;Reddy et al, 2010). Their number, types and functionalities are escalating rapidly while their size is decreasing.…”

“…Software developers are struggling to manage the software complexities while embedded system developers are trying to manage the hardware or firmware complexities (Cavet et al, 2007;Gulliksen, 2007;Kim et al, 2007;Navarre et al, 2011). However, the physical interface and interaction complexities are often being neglected resulting in the development of complex and poorly interactive embedded systems (Coskun and Grabowski, 2005;Dix et al, 2009;Ferscha et al, 2007;Hare et al, 2009;Koutsabasis et al, 2007;Majid et al, 2011;Meier et al, 2011;Reddy et al, 2010). Although all the development efforts are aimed to facilitate the user but the user ends up getting difficult products to work with.…”

“…Although all the development efforts are aimed to facilitate the user but the user ends up getting difficult products to work with. This difficulty of usage can either be cognitive, physical or both (Blackler et al, 2010a;Blackler et al, 2010b;Persad et al, 2011;Reddy et al, 2010). Embedded systems normally offer physical user interfaces consisting of buttons, knobs, switches, dials, sliders and various other controls.…”