An empirical investigation into the preferences of the elderly for user interface design in personal electronic health record systems

Background

With the continuous advancement of digital technologies, electronic Personal Health Records (ePHR) offer end-users greater control and convenience over their health data. Although ePHR are perceived as innovative tools in medical services that provide patient-centered care and disease prevention, many system interfaces are inclined toward younger users, overlooking investigations pertinent to elderly users. Our objective is to uncover the preferences of the elderly for an ideal ePHR system interface.

Materials and methods

Relying on a literature review, we identified six interface attributes. Utilizing conjoint analysis, we constructed 16 representative design scenarios based on orthogonal design by combining different attribute levels. We invited 187 elderly participants to evaluate these scenarios. Data analysis was performed using SPSS 26.0. The results indicate that among the ePHR interface design attributes, the elderly prioritize color attributes, followed by the notification method. Designs with contrasting color schemes, skeuomorphic design approaches, and icon-centric menu navigation with segmented layouts, and voice notifications when a message is received, are the most preferred interface design choices.

Discussion

This research elucidates the ideal interface design elements for ePHR as perceived by the elderly, offering valuable references for age-friendly design considerations in ePHR systems.

Results

Implementing these insights can aid in promoting mobile health services among the elderly demographic, enhancing their user experience in health management interfaces. This, in turn, fosters the widespread adoption of mobile health service technologies, further advancing the development of a healthy aging society.

Visual Style Elements in Human-System Interface Design for Nuclear Power Operations: Does Style Affect Performance and Preference?

OBJECTIVE

As the world increasingly adopts renewable and sustainable energy systems, transitionary solutions include nuclear power, which currently provides 20% of the United States' electricity and is the largest single source of carbon-free electricity generation. Advanced reactors are a critical component of a carbon-free mixed energy portfolio that require careful design of first-of-a-kind control rooms.

BACKGROUND

The application of Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is essential for scientific and iterative testing of novel human-system interface (HSI) concepts to ensure effective, efficient, and safe plant operations. Microworlds are simulators that use simplified physics models and control systems to distill nuclear power operations into essential functions.

METHOD

HFE scientists used the Rancor Microworld Simulator to obtain preference and performance metrics for novel and traditional static HSI design styles. Participants comprised advanced reactor company employees and nuclear industry consultants. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative data was captured.

RESULTS

There was a preference for the basic graphical style that included high contrast and traditional color scheme elements. No single HSI design outperformed the others, and the participants did not perform better using their preferred HSI style.

CONCLUSION

This experiment is the first in a series of HFE testing for HSIs in advanced reactor control room development. Clear user preferences emerged for elements within static displays. The cutting-edge neumorphic style was the least preferred. Future directions include tests of dynamic displays.

APPLICATION

HFE is used in evaluating and designing HSI devices that will improve the efficiency and safety of advanced nuclear power operations.

The impact of different age-friendly smart home interface styles on the interaction behavior of elderly users

Smart homes create a beneficial environment for the lives of elderly people and enhance the quality of their home lives. This study aims to explore the design of age-friendly interfaces that can meet the emotional needs of self-care elderly people from the perspective of functional realization of the operating interface. Sixteen elderly users aged fifty-five and above were selected as subjects with healthy eyes and no excessive drooping eyelids to obscure them. Four representative age-friendly applications with different interface designs were selected from the Android application market as the stimulus material for the experiment, and a total of fifteen pages were browsed independently. During the experiment, the ErgoLAB human-computer environment synchronization cloud platform was used to monitor and record the subjects' multidimensional physiological indicators of eye movements, skin electricity, and heart rate variability when using different styles of mobile application interfaces. Combined with the post-experimental PAD emotion scale data, the preferences of emotional interface design elements of the self-care elderly were analyzed to guide the subsequent design practice. The results show that: on the layout characteristics of the home page, a simple and intuitive multi-column layout or card layout combined with a bottom navigation bar type main navigation is used; on the choice of the main color, a single color with low saturation is used as the main color, with high saturation color accents to play a role in highlighting key information; on the information density of the home page, a moderate proportion of graphics and text is adopted, with low information density; on the arrangement of the page content, they try to give priority to information content with high user relevance.

An Innovative Approach for the Evaluation of the Web Page Impact Combining User Experience and Neural Network Score

The proposed paper introduces an innovative methodology useful to assign intelligent scores to web pages. The approach is based on the simultaneous use of User eXperience (UX), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms, providing the web page scoring and taking into account outlier conditions to construct the training dataset. Specifically, the UX tool analyses different parameters addressing the score, such as navigation time, number of clicks, and mouse movements for page, finding possible outliers, the ANN are able to predict outliers, and the LSTM processes the web pages tags together with UX and user scores. The final web page score is assigned by the LSTM model corrected by the UX output and improved by the navigation user score. This final score is useful for the designer by suggesting the tags typologies structuring a new web page layout of a specific topic. By using the proposed methodology, the web designer is addressed to allocate contents in the web page layout. The work has been developed within a framework of an industry project oriented on the formulation of an innovative AI interface for web designers.

Skeuomorphic or flat icons for an efficient visual search by younger and older adults?

The debate around skeuomorphic and flat designs has been long lasting and inconclusive, in part because of the lack of empirical evidence supporting the superiority of one or the other icon style from the perspectives of function and aesthetics. Therefore, this study investigated whether older and younger users perceive the aesthetics of icon styles in the same manner as designers and which style results in the most efficient visual search. Using an experimental system that we developed, 24 older and 24 younger participants rated and searched application icons belonging to the two styles. The results indicated that there was generally a notable difference between participants' and designers' perceptions of icon design styles, even after training, and that the perceived icon design styles further influenced the visual search time and accuracy of the participants as well as their evaluation of the icons' beauty. The results imply that the younger participants could use the skeuomorphic icons more efficiently than they could use the flat icons and that they had an advantage over older participants in terms of this ability; however, aesthetically they appreciated flat icons more. In contrast, older participants searched skeuomorphic icons more quickly and accurately than they did flat icons, and aesthetically they appreciated skeuomorphic icons more.

Can Skeuomorphic Design Provide a Better Online Banking User Experience for Older Adults?

With the prevalence of digital technologies and internet connectivity, combined with the reduction in footfall on high streets, banks have taken steps to move most of their customer base online. This has left many older adults behind, trying to keep up with the changes and having to learn to use sometimes complex online banking interfaces. In this work we investigate whether skeuomorphic design can create a more usable online banking system for older adults, compared to the more commonplace flat design. This work took a user-centered approach, beginning with interviews with older adults that were conducted to gather data to be used in the production of prototype user interfaces. Two prototypes were then created: a flat user interface and a skeuomorphic one. We evaluated these interfaces with 15 older adults, gathering a combination of data, including data from the System Usability Scale, observations, and interviews. Results of the experiments showed that our older users preferred the flat prototype to the skeuomorphic one, but raised some potentially useful guidelines for the design of future skeuomorphic user interfaces for older adults. A validation experiment with 17 younger adults (aged 20–25) also showed that the skeuomorphic interface was more usable for older adults than younger ones.