Using participatory activities with seniors to critique, build, and evaluate mobile phones
Michael Massimi, Ronald M. Baecker, Michael Wu · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07) · doi:10.1145/1296843.1296871
Summary
This Assets '07 paper from University of Toronto engages older adults not as subjects of a usability study but as co-designers of a mobile phone system. Massimi, Baecker, and Wu argue that the two dominant trends in 'senior-friendly' phone design — oversimplified handsets like the Silverphone Easy5 (seven keys, five preset numbers) and hand-me-down phones inherited from younger relatives — both fail by assuming that older adults want fewer features rather than different ones. The paper's contribution is a structured participatory-design engagement over seven weekly group meetings with five women aged 55 to 86, each with varying combinations of vision, hearing, tremor, and mobility limitations, plus follow-up individual user tests and a four-week real-world deployment. The team used three main participatory methods: mobile-phone critiques (slide-show-driven discussion of a variety of handset form factors), scenario-based design (illustrated stories of useful phone moments), and paper prototyping using PICTIVE. From this the seniors generated a main-menu design, a hardware wish list, and paper prototypes of a calendar and address book application. The authors then built 'Recall', a Windows Mobile 5 prototype on the i-Mate K-JAM PDA phone that implemented five of the seven envisioned applications. Recall was compared against the stock Windows Mobile contact manager in individual usability sessions, and two participants used the phone for four more weeks with ongoing training. The paper's contribution is less the prototype itself than the set of design and methodological lessons extracted from the six-month engagement.
Key findings
The seniors did not want a simplified phone — they wanted a phone with seven application areas: calendar, address book, notebook, in-phone usage help, reminder alarms, parlour games (valued for reducing waiting-room stress and keeping the mind sharp), and a dedicated emergency function that auto-dials 911 and family. Hardware problems dominated the usability trouble: seniors accidentally pressed buttons on the sides and back of the device with their non-dominant hand; soft keys whose meaning changed per application broke mental-model construction; inconsistent 'home' behaviour on the hang-up button was deeply confusing; modifier keys to enter numbers on a QWERTY keyboard caused repeated errors; and slide-out keyboards were hard to open. Contact managers modelled on business users (fields for 'department', 'secretary', 'fax') actively obstructed seniors' simpler personal use cases. The authors also surface a useful three-way framing — 'Design for Me' vs 'Design for Us' vs 'Design for Them' — to describe tensions within participatory teams, and offer methodological guidelines including: provide alternative activities for participants whose disabilities block one mode of contribution, create temporary pairings to complement deficits, minimise crosstalk for hearing-impaired participants, and blend individual with group sessions. Two of four participants could not recognise the design they helped create three months earlier, which tempers claims about the durability of co-design artefacts.
Relevance
For anyone designing mobile technology for older adults or users with mixed age-related disabilities, this paper is still a useful reference. Its design considerations — eliminate side and rear buttons, avoid soft keys, give a single consistent home button, offer multiple input modalities, avoid modifier-key number entry, orient data structures to personal rather than business use, and take program naming seriously — map directly onto decisions that phone and app designers continue to make badly. The 'Design for Me / Us / Them' framing is a practical way to talk about scope tensions in any inclusive-design engagement. Its methodological guidance on participatory activities with older adults — especially the observation that seniors are often better critics than designers, and that they may unconsciously 'compromise' their designs to match researchers' expectations — is a caution that applies to most co-design work with disabled and older populations. Limitations are considerable: five participants, all women, no intersectional diversity reported, and 2007 hardware that has largely been replaced by touchscreens. Yet many of the accessibility problems identified (inconsistent back-button behaviour, business-oriented contact fields) have merely migrated forward rather than been solved.
Tags: mobile accessibility · older adults · aging · participatory design · co-design · paper prototyping · usability · design guidelines · scenario-based design · PICTIVE