Designing web search UI for the elderly community: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Now-a-days the number of older people or senior citizens are rapidly increasing across the world and their need for the internet is also increasing mostly for information searching to make them up to date with the current trends and news. Therefore, they need a search user interface that is to be elderly-friendly so as to communicate with the computing system and to attain better results for their search task. The user interface is the only way of communication between the users and the computing systems. Currently, available user interfaces focus only on youngsters' needs and their recommendations to attract them, but the need for seniors is neglected, because of which the elders could not handle these complicated user interfaces for their search task and attain their target information. Thus, this topic is in trend today by the researchers to build a new type of user interface that can cope up with the elderly needs and to improve their daily life. Even though there exists a considerable growth in this research area, there are no attempts made to analyze the existing studies systematically and utilize those ideas mentioned by various other researchers. Thus, in this systematic literature review, the existing methods of search user interfaces and the elderly user behaviors are well analyzed and then certain recommendations are proposed which are useful for future researches in this field. The objective of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to collect and analyze the facts that are proposed in existing research articles and existing designs of web search user interface that are related to the challenges, impact and limitations that elderly people are experiencing while doing a web search in their daily activities so as to gather information online. This SLR is organized by gathering all the existing survey papers and research papers that have been published over a specific period of time. These papers are systematically reviewed by some pre-defined reviewing strategy thereby making a conclusion regarding the design of user interface for the elderly community. A total of 30 studies are selected as primary subject for the literature survey regarding web search user interface for the elderly. From these selected studies, the data needed for the research are extracted using an approach of systematic mapping and are synthesized to acquire knowledge related to the current research topic. These studies are analyzed and synthesized in such a way that the knowledgeis used for answering the research questions formulated during the survey. The information regarding the user interface for interaction, the assistance provided to elderly by the existing user interfaces, the impact created by those UI’s on the elderly community and the research gaps and limitations that occur in existing researches and systems while communicating with the computing systems through a user interface for their daily internet search activities are extracted and some recommendations are proposed for future researchers. There are some more research gaps identified in the current state-of-the-art since most of the researches don’t focus on the aging of the elderly and their consequences while interacting with the computing system through a user interface. Thus, this research can help in finding a better understanding of elders and the difficulties faced by them while searching through the internet so as to develop a positive impact for the researchers to create an elderly-friendly user interface for web search activities.