Abstract
Mobile phone applications interfaces offer great support to various age group users. There is a lot of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (here after HCI) research work going on, which is found in User Experience – UX issues. Until now little research work is done on Mobile phone icons and its effect on learn ability for various age group users. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of mobile phone icons characteristics on users’ age groups. In current research work we carry out an exploratory study followed by an in-depth experimental based study in order to find out which icons characteristics effect icon usability for various age group users. From experimental results, it is revealed that elderly have more issues while interpreting mobile phone icons, but specifically icon characteristics-semantic distance, familiarity and complexity- are having potential in order to improve icon user experience. We further discuss how design guidelines can support application designers to design application icons that can be adopted by various age group users and be beneficial for them.
Highlights
Icons are essential component of user interfaces, as they turn into a gateway to the vast number of functionalities for such mobile devices
In order to investigate in detail, the effect of each of icon characteristics on the icons user experiences, we extend the study and further explore with the help of experiment in order to see the effect of characteristics on various age group users i.e., with younger and older adults
In the current experimental study, our objective was to find out the effects of icon characteristics on various age group users, in order to have in-depth idea what design strategies to use to better design icons
Summary
Icons are essential component of user interfaces, as they turn into a gateway to the vast number of functionalities for such mobile devices. As there is a growth in new technologies and platforms, there is a growth in number of users who use those technologies. Many users lack skills in mobile phone technologies as they are unable to understand and operate those applications (Wilkinson et al, 2013). The end users are the main target of the market producing new platforms and technologies. It is observed that little research work has been carried out on the influence of graphical icons on various age group users when using modern mobile phone technologies (Ghayas et al, 2013a). There is effect on cognition and perception capabilities which results effecting elderly users’ ability in interpreting icons (Marcus, 2013)
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