Older Adults' Disorientation in Smartphones: Exploring the Role of Spatial Ability and Quantifying Cognitive Similarity Between Perceived and Physical Information Structure.
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| Title: | Older Adults' Disorientation in Smartphones: Exploring the Role of Spatial Ability and Quantifying Cognitive Similarity Between Perceived and Physical Information Structure. |
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| Authors: | Cao, Jingjing1 (AUTHOR), Zhou, Ziyao2 (AUTHOR), Zhou, Jia1 (AUTHOR) zhoujia07@gmail.com |
| Source: | International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Sep2025, Vol. 41 Issue 17, p10980-10995. 16p. |
| Subjects: | Spatial ability, Smartphones, Conceptual structures, Aging, Older people, User experience, Similarity (Psychology) |
| Abstract: | Older adults are prone to getting lost when switching between screens on smartphones. Navigating through screens can be demanding regarding the user's spatial ability, which tends to decline with age. This study investigates the impact of information structure and spatial ability on older adults' navigation in smartphone applications. It proposes a method of quantifying cognitive similarity between older adults' perceived information structure and designers' information structure used in applications. Researchers designed three different structured applications as prototypes, with low, medium, and high levels of netting, but with the same contents. Thirty older adults over 65 years of age and thirty younger adults were recruited to participate in the experiment, completing two types of navigation tasks. There were three main findings from our experiment. Firstly, the more reticulated the information structure, the longer the navigation task took the older adults to complete and the more errors were returned, which was the opposite of the results for younger adults. Second, spatial ability has no significant impact on the performance of the process page navigation task. However, it has a significant correlation with the cognitive similarity of older adults to a certain information structure. The higher the score of spatial memory span and pointing ability, the more accurate the cognition construction. Thirdly, the fitting degree of user mind and information structure can be predicted on the premise of specific information structure and given user spatial ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: | Engineering Source |
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| Abstract: | Older adults are prone to getting lost when switching between screens on smartphones. Navigating through screens can be demanding regarding the user's spatial ability, which tends to decline with age. This study investigates the impact of information structure and spatial ability on older adults' navigation in smartphone applications. It proposes a method of quantifying cognitive similarity between older adults' perceived information structure and designers' information structure used in applications. Researchers designed three different structured applications as prototypes, with low, medium, and high levels of netting, but with the same contents. Thirty older adults over 65 years of age and thirty younger adults were recruited to participate in the experiment, completing two types of navigation tasks. There were three main findings from our experiment. Firstly, the more reticulated the information structure, the longer the navigation task took the older adults to complete and the more errors were returned, which was the opposite of the results for younger adults. Second, spatial ability has no significant impact on the performance of the process page navigation task. However, it has a significant correlation with the cognitive similarity of older adults to a certain information structure. The higher the score of spatial memory span and pointing ability, the more accurate the cognition construction. Thirdly, the fitting degree of user mind and information structure can be predicted on the premise of specific information structure and given user spatial ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| ISSN: | 10447318 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/10447318.2024.2439638 |
