Software for Senior Citizens

Software for Senior Citizens An Experiential Learning Course in Gerontology, Software Usability and Digital Literacy Leo C. Ureel II Computer Science Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI, USA ureel@mtu.edu Abstract Two trends in the developed world the marked growth in the percentage of the population identified as elderly, and an increased reliance on computing technology make it imperative that the high technology designers of tomorrow understand the challenges, capabilities and context of elderly users. Our graduate course on software for senior citizens provides a broad background of material from humancomputer interaction, gerontology, literacy studies and cognitive and learning sciences. Students also gain first-hand experience through weekly tutoring sessions with local elderly residents. These sessions yield observations and generate contacts from which students generate research projects. This paper discusses our goals and motivations for the course, our experiences to date, and our plans for future iterations and opportunities for expansion. Keywords Human-Computer Interaction, Gerontology, Digital Literacy, Service Learning I. INTRODUCTION As society in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world adapts to new uses and forms of computing, many of our elderly citizens are being left out. The movement toward digital technology has much to offer the elderly: a wealth of news and health information and the ability to stay in touch with distant friends and family, to name a few. But with digital literacy moving from an attractive option to a necessity, many seniors especially those on fixed incomes and with limited access to current technology are experiencing frustration and helplessness. It is not only a valuable opportunity but a moral imperative for students in computing disciplines to be aware of the challenges facing this important but overlooked constituency. We have piloted a course that combines research in usability and digital literacy for the elderly with a community outreach program at the local public library. Our multidisciplinary graduate-level course investigates aspects of software design for an aging population. In their new role as tutors for the elderly, our students are placed in a position to question their implicit assumptions about use of technology. The design and execution of this course could be characterized as a pilot or pre-study that aims to understand how the seemingly disparate activities of teaching, learning, research, and community outreach can be effectively combined. Results from this course could be used to evaluate Charles Wallace Computer Science Michigan Technological University Houghton, MI, USA wallace@mtu.edu the feasibility of partnering with community organizations to assist the elderly, assessment procedures in the classroom, new research methods developed by the students, and the development of future courses. This paper discusses our goals and motivations for the course, our experiences to date, and our plans for future iterations and opportunities for expansion. II. MOTIVATION Senior citizens comprise the largest and fastest growing demographic in the digital divide. By the year 2050, the population of older Americans is projected to be 88.5 million, 20.2% of the total population [1]. At the same time, the pace of new technology adoption is accelerating. Seniors are suddenly forced to use computers to perform routine tasks that were previously paper-based, such as filing tax returns, using coupons, or changing their address. Most seniors do not have computers, have never used computers, or have only used computers at work. Even those with computer skills are often frustrated when they find that standards and norms have shifted since their last experience with computers, rendering their hard-earned skills worthless. Our desire to create this course derives in part from the particular character of our local area and our university. Michigan Tech, located in the far northwest corner of the U.S. State of Michigan, near the shore of Lake Superior, is a research intensive university focused on technology, engineering, and scientific degree programs. Its international, high-technology atmosphere is in stark contrast to the experience of residents outside the university. County residents over age 65 constitute 15.2% of the 2011 population. Many of their relatives live far away, and those who stay struggle to get by in an economically depressed area with few jobs outside the university. Because of the larger than average number of elders without family support, many of whom are below the poverty limit, there is a strong need for help with digital literacy in this community. As a pilot offering, the designers of this course seek to combine research and meaningful study of usability and digital literacy with a service learning component that supports the needs of the elderly. The service learning component of our course precipitates some unlikely pairings: on one hand, local residents with long family ties to the area and varying levels of technological literacy; on the other hand, graduate student tutors from around the globe, with extensive interest and 978-1-4673-5261-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

experience in technology. These encounters are designed to help tomorrow s technologists understand the situation of the elderly and to foster consciousness as they create software for an aging population. Furthermore, through our community service activities we aim to ease elders transition to a computer-based society. III. COURSE CREATION AND STRUCTURE Software for Senior Citizens is a multidisciplinary course investigating aspects of software design for and use by an aging population. The course combines graduate-level readings and discussions with hands-on projects involving seniors from weekly help sessions at the public library. Students learn about the context that older users operate in (e.g. their attitudes, skills physical barriers) and engage in some design activity aimed at providing a better experience. Our course leverages a successful outreach effort that we have continued since 2011 [2]. Students at our university have been meeting weekly at the local public library with community members, most of them 60 years of age or older. This series of meetings, called Online at the Library, provides one-on-one tutoring for people with questions about digital technology. Some participants are ordinary people who may have never used a computer but suddenly find themselves required to conduct online banking transactions or update electronic retirement information. Others may have used computers but have fallen out of practice. Still others need help transferring skills from PCs to new mobile devices. Most of them struggle with things that those among the techno-literati find simple. In creating the course, we follow a long tradition of service learning in university courses, and two efforts in particular to introduce students in computing disciplines to the context of elderly computer use. Pace University s undergraduate Intergenerational Computing course offers instruction in technology and gerontology theory and service learning involving personal tutoring at elderly residence facilities [3]. In a software design course at Iowa State University, students meet with real elderly users and design products based on their interactions [4]. The reports on these efforts have inspired us to combine the threads of theory, training, service learning and research into a single course. IV. IN THE CLASSROOM Two of the three weekly contact hours for the course take place at the university. Classroom activities include discussion of readings and activities to increase awareness and train students in research techniques. Understanding the problem. Our initial readings delve into the demographics of an aging population and the physical, cognitive and social barriers faced by the elderly [5][6]. Of particular interest is the concept of lag: the lack of congruence between individual and environment that lies at the heart of many challenges for the elderly [7]. This theoretical construction has helped us to frame the particular concerns we have witnessed at our help sessions. Readings from literacy studies also helped to frame elderly computing skills as a literacy problem [8][9]. Identifying different levels of literacy, beyond the mechanical notion of functional literacy to higher levels of critical and rhetorical literacy, has allowed us to think of teaching digital literacy as something broader and more exciting than training of rote procedures [10]. Finally, readings on design for elderly use have provoked discussion of personal experiences with effective and flawed interface design [11][12]. Building empathy. Getting students to envision themselves as elders themselves is an important component of the course. Through a generous loan from the Ford Motor Company, students have taken turns wearing a Third Age Suit, designed to constrain movement and obscure senses to simulate the effects of aging [13]. Experiences during the service learning sessions also bring to life the realities of aging; student experiences are shared during classroom sessions and on the course blog. Figure 1: Wearing the Third Age Suit Practicing methods. One course is not enough to cover the wide variety of analysis techniques available to designers. Students have discussed and practiced the think aloud approach to activity analysis [14] and ethnographic observation [15]. Students have also practiced user task analysis on common computer tasks, in an effort to understand their own approaches to accomplishing tasks online [16]. In their summary statements posted on the blog, students reflected on the difference between their own digital native behavior and that of the elders they had encountered at the library: I observed using Amazon... I really liked how she scanned the screen in a circle around the streaming content, looking for affordances that would help her with her task. This was an obvious contrast to the way seniors try to read the screen; left to right, top to bottom. It seems seniors either try to read everything in a linear fashion, or freeze up and read nothing because of information overload. On Facebook, I was the user and observed. I found Facebook difficult to setup. It was hard to find settings, especially privacy settings, to setup the account in the way I wanted. Facebook is completely open by default and I wanted to lock it down and then open up features I wanted as I discovered I need them. It was a very frustrating and time consuming experience (it took over an hour to create an

account) I can't imagine a senior attempting to setup an account. V. ONLINE AT THE LIBRARY In the experiential component of the course, students help community members with real computing needs. In conjunction with the public library, we offer weekly computer help sessions open to anyone in the community (Fig. 2). Students in our class act as individual tutors, teaching elders how to use the Internet to keep in touch with people, share pictures and letters, find information, and much more. Participants are welcome to bring their laptop computers if they choose, or they may use the library s computers. People may attend as many of the sessions as they wish. Our students reflect on each week s tutoring session through a class blog and in-class discussions. Double Scrollbars are Confusing. One elder spent 3 minutes looking for the Gmail send-button because it had scrolled out of view due to the size of the email he was sending, and Gmail uses a double vertical scroll bar, an inner one on the message, an outer one on the work page that includes send buttons. This is ridiculously confusing, even to people who use it all the time. Classroom time is an opportunity to explore interface issues like this in depth (Figure 3). Figure 3: Discussing the double scrollbar problem in class Figure 2: Online at the Library While helping community members, students began to catalog common tasks that require assistance: sending pictures in email, bookmarking web pages, browsing the web, searching for people or information, paying bills online, using antivirus software, removing viruses or malware. Our course blog has been an effective repository of stories illustrating some of the problems seniors encounter while using computers: Connecting to the Network. I helped a gentleman get on the library network. Generally, when someone is unable to connect to the internet on a laptop, the first thing I look for is a switch or button on the sides of the laptop that can switch-off the wireless. These buttons are put there so you can turn-off wireless on a plane, or in a hospital, or just to conserve battery. In this case, there was a button on his keyboard, above the function keys, that toggled wireless. Cursor Related Difficulties. The woman I was working with [couldn t figure out] how to get the video started. I know that in many cases, there is a play icon that appears superimposed on the video image - that is an affordance that draws the user toward mousing over the video. But in this case, there was nothing! It made me think about how mouseover has quietly become a new standard behavior: if you can see something on the screen that you want to interact with, but you re not exactly sure what it is or what you can do with it, mouse over it. Students were reflective in their observations and often frank and even critical of themselves: What did you notice today at tutoring? Is it more about teaching or about what design we see that is annoying? I was bossy and made practice attaching photos to her email. I told another that google maps directions are not helpful if she already knows a good local route, but at least I showed her how it would be helpful if she had no idea how to get somewhere. I helped change his desktop picture and I bit my tongue when he picked something ugly. So that was a small small small success on my personal growth. I m afraid I was not in a great place this morning, having had to get up and into work very early to handle a problem with a live system. So I was tired, stressed, and irritable when I arrived at the library. Students had fun working with the elders: Today I helped learn about using Google products. That is to say we played the whole time. Today I helped a few different people and had a great time. One wanted to start learning excel, not sure I helped her that much. Another was very high frustration but seemed happy when she realized that things were not broken and it was not going to be hard to use her new system. Another wanted me to help her husband and I hope I did. Then I helped someone at the end and we learned together. A good tutoring day! Yay! Elders often come with focused, sophisticated questions: Then she asked about a more advanced topic. How does one insert a picture into a document. So I showed her how to

do that from the insert tab. Then she wanted to know how to resize the image without distorting it. So we talked about selecting the image and using the handles to change its shape or to rotate it. had arranged his spreadsheet like you would arrange a set of papers on your desk. There were multiple tables laid side-by-side, but the rows of the tables didn t match up with one another. So when it came time to sort the entries in one of the tables, it was a nightmare. I carefully put each table into a separate worksheet (I ll admit, I did some steering on his laptop), then showed him how he could get to the various tables by clicking on the tabs. He s going to need some practice getting used to that unless he understands tab navigation, he s going to wonder where those other tables went. VI. RESEARCH PROJECTS The tutoring experience at the library forms the basis for student-conducted research addressing technical, and social issues connected to the digital divide. These projects offer students the opportunity to pursue their interest in this area beyond the bounds of our course. We received IRB approval for including our library attendees as subjects in research projects. In their projects, students have investigated a range of topics: receptiveness to Twitter; effect of visual clutter on elders ability to navigate unfamiliar websites; patterns of communication between tutor and student in the help sessions; use of user interface gestures by the elderly between different device platforms. Are tablets the answer? One undergraduate student enrolled in the course wanted to find out why modern interfaces are difficult for elders to learn and use. Based on observations at the library of seniors using desktop computers, he concluded that there are three main aspects of user interfaces that posed the largest barriers: mouse (finding and manipulating the cursor, distinguishing between cursor and caret, distinguishing between click and double click, distinguishing between left and right click, selecting data), windows (finding the active window, moving between windows), and files (understanding the file hierarchy, locating files). The student was interested in exploring the new paradigm of tablet computing as a potential solution for these problems. He led a group of library attendees through a series of tasks on an ipad. He concluded that the tablet paradigm eliminated the problems that seniors had using windows because only one application is active at a time. Likewise, because the ipad hides the file system, seniors did not experience any problems finding files. Although the touch-screen interface solves many of the mouse-related problems, it introduces some new problems: double tap and tap-hold confused seniors, and none of the seniors were able to copy-and-paste. Communication patterns. A Ph.D. student in the course studied the patterns of communication exhibited between the seniors and tutors during help sessions at the library [17]. Her work consisted of data gathering at the help sessions and rhetorical analysis of the interactions between tutors and elders (Fig. 4). Her observations revealed a range of strategies that tutors use in explaining and training. While the elderly attendees generally had few planned questions, running through activities together, with the prop of the computer artifact, elicited questions. Direction was more commonly used than demonstration, but when the latter is necessary, tutors tend to use think aloud to expose their mental model. Tutoring is tactical in nature, and often the methods of instruction must change in the moment for instance, when tutors did not know a solution immediately, they frequently switched to an explore together pattern. Figure 4: Communication pattern analysis Lessons from our elders. After the end of the course, a number of the students collaborated on a conference paper detailing our findings, in the context of lessons learned for technology designers [18]. The main findings are summarized below: Anxiety stifles exploration. Stories from mass media provide unrealistic models of threats. Fears of losing data or compromising secret information reduce the kind of free-form exploration that students in the course use to learn about new interfaces. Details obscure abstraction. With the advent of multiple types of computing platform tablets and smartphones, in addition to traditional personal computers elders can get lost in the details of a particular device and fail to see the commonality between them. This is particularly problematic when addressing cloud-based services. Lag complicates adoption. Slow changes to infrastructure in our rural area puts elders at a disadvantage. Arcane and ever-changing vocabulary keeps elders in the dark, and their hard-earned computer knowledge depreciates rapidly with today s rate of technological change. VII. WORLD USABILITY DAY Students in the class participated in World Usability Day (November 8, 2012) by hosting an event on campus. The goal of the event was to raise awareness of the usability issues faced by the elderly. We began the day by meeting with interested seniors to make signs for a march across campus (Figure 5). Seniors made signs indicating how they felt about technology, the

questions they had about computers, or what they had learned from the students. Their slogans echo the concerns and frustrations we encounter at our help sessions: I need computer Computer no need me ; How do you turn it on? ; Device not Recognized ; Files everywhere and yet I cannot find it! Students and elders marched onto campus where we were stopped by the police! After we explained that we were non-violent and that this was an official, scheduled event, we were allowed to continue. This excited some of the senior citizens and we heard stories of their participation in protest marches while in college. Figure 5: Seniors marching for World Usability Day After the march, there was a poster session for students research projects and a discussion forum. Seniors and students participated in an open forum, discussing their experiences working with each other to learn how to use computers. VIII. FUTURE WORK Our pilot of this course produced a rich discourse, both in class and online, a broad array of creative research projects, and assistance to the outreach program at the library. It should be noted that the class size was small - only five students - and that only Computer Science was represented. The structure of the course is well suited for interdisciplinary study, and we hope to bring a broader group of students together for the next offering of the course. Students in our Technical Communication and Cognitive Science programs would be particularly well suited for the course. We also plan to explore the option of scaling the course up to serve a larger body of students. Furthermore, we hope that by reporting on this course, we can help others develop similar programs in their communities. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We wish to thank Professor Lauren Bowen for attending the course and providing expertise on digital literacy. Chris Alquist and the rest of the staff of the Portage Lake District Library have kindly shared their facility and time for our tutoring efforts. Cynthia Drake and other employees and volunteers at Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly have connected us with elders in need of our assistance. Chad Esselink and Ford Motor Company kindly provided the Third Age Suit. Finally, we wish to thank the students in our course and all the volunteers and attendees at Online at the Library. REFERENCES [1] Grayson K. Vincent and Victoria A. Velkoff (2010). The Next Four Decades, The Older Population in the United States: 2010 to 2050. Current Population Reports, P25-1138, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC. [2] Marcia Goodrich (2012). Back to School: From Email To Excel, Tech Students And Faculty Are Prepping Seniors For The Digital Age. Michigan Tech Magazine, Fall 2012. [3] Sharon Stahl Wexler, Lin J. Drury, Jean F. Coppola, Brian J. Tschinkel and Barbara A. Thomas (2011). 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