User Experience Evaluation of Mobile Spiritual Applications for Older People: an Interview and Observation Study

Developments in religion and spirituality in the world of mobile technology seem to flourish with the increasing of thousand applications that assisting daily spirituality practices and experience. At the same time, world scenario shows drastically increasing number of older people worldwide. In conjunction with the intertwined scenario between increasing number of elderly and rapid developments of mobile spiritual technology, HCI researchers are urged to design mobile spiritual application tailored to an older people need to ensure the usefulness of the application. This initial study seeks to address on the issue of older peoples' spirituality experiences, whereby the study focused on the use of interviews and observation methods in capturing older people spiritual experience while engaging with mobile spiritual application and secondly, mapping of the spirituality elements with an Emotion Model. This study as well investigates the suitability of using interviews and observation method in evaluation to capture older peoples' experiences. An interview has been conducted with eight older peoples in the field study (home and working place). Interview and observation are good tools in capturing user experience data, however, an improvement on the research method should be done to ensure the results gained is reliable and the questions used while interviewing is easy to understand by older people. The study also indicates that interview activities with older people are a complex task and so it is necessary to be applied in a different and proper way. Therefore, appropriate steps in doing interview study with older people are also suggested in this paper.