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Oliver Duerr, Mohamed Khamis, Daniel Buschek, Florian Alt
HelpMe: Assisting Older Adults in Performing Tasks on Mobile Devices
Proceedings of the CHI 2017 Workshop on Designing Mobile Interactions for the Ageing Populations. Denver, CO, USA, May 6 - 11, 2017. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib)

Although mobile devices are becoming more ubiquitous, older adults have trouble catching up with the dynamics of technological innovation in smartphones. Most custom solutions for them rely on a proprietary UI with an extenuated number of interaction possibilities. While these solutions do help with basic tasks such as calling the right person, many of the benefits of having a smartphone are clearly dislodged. We introduce and evaluate a prototype, HelpMe, for older adult users who want to use more demanding Apps without external assistance. Through a prestudy we uncovered a set of behaviors that imply that the user needs assistance. By detecting these behaviors or by manual request, HelpMe overlays information that explain to the user what can be done on the current screen and what the different UI symbols resemble. We evaluated HelpMe in a subsequent study where we collected feedback and measured the workload. Our findings show that older adult users would benefit from HelpMe, and that it reduces the perceived workload.