A Study on the Icon Feedback Types of Small Touch Screen for the Elderly

Small touch screens are widely used in applications such as bank ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, ticket vending machines, facsimiles, and home automation in the daily life. It is intuition-oriented and easy to operate. There are a lot of elements that affect the small screen touch performance. One of the essential parts is icon feedback. However, to merely achieve beautiful icon feedback appearance and create interesting interaction experience, many interface designers ignore the real user needs. It is critical for them to trade off the icon feedback type associated with the different users needs in the touch interaction. This is especially important when the user capability is very limited. This paper described a pilot study for identifying factors that determine the icon feedback usability on small touch screen in four older adult Cognitrone groups since current research aimed mostly at general icon guidelines and recommendations and failed to consider and define the specific needs of small touch screen interfaces for the elderly. In this paper, we presented a concept from the focus on human necessity and use a cognitive assessment tool, which is, Cognitrone test, to measure older adult’s attention and concentration capability and learn more about how to evaluate and design suitable small screen icon feedback types. Forty-five elder participants were participated. Each subject was asked to complete a battery of Cognitrone tests and divided into 4 groups. Each subject was also requested to perform a set of ‘continuous touch’ usability tasks on small touch screen and comment on open-ended questions. Results are discussed with respect to the perceptual and cognitive factors that influence older adults in the use of icon feedback on small touch screen. It showed significant associations between icon feedback performance and factors of attention and concentration. However, this interrelation was much stronger for the Group 2 and Group 4, especially for Type B, Type C and Type G. Moreover, consistent with previous research, older participants were less sensitive and required longer time to adapt to the high-detailed icon feedback. These results are discussed in terms of icon feedback design strategies for interface designers.