Peter G. Fairweather
ABSTRACT
Older adults differ from younger ones in the ways they experience the World Wide Web. For example, they tend to move from page to page more slowly, take more time to complete tasks, make more repeated visits to pages, and take more time to select link targets than their younger counterparts. These differences are consistent with the physical and cognitive declines associated with aging. The picture that emerges has older adults doing the same sorts of things with websites as younger adults, although less efficiently, less accurately and more slowly. This paper questions that view. We present new findings that show that, to accomplish their purposes, older adults may systematically undertake different activities and use different parts of websites than younger adults. We examined how a group of adults 18 to 73 years of age moved through a complex website seeking to solve a specific problem. We found that the users exhibited strong age--related tendencies to follow particular paths and visit particular zones while in pursuit of a common goal. We also assessed how experience with the web may mediate these tendencies. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of the finding that users' characteristics not only affect how they navigate but what activities they undertake along the way.
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Index Terms
- How older and younger adults differ in their approach to problem solving on a complex website
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Reviews
Mariana Damova
Treating an interesting topic of increasing importance, Fairweather describes a thoroughly designed and well-executed experiment, giving a straightforward answer to the question posed. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate how the Web is being browsed by groups of different ages and competence levels. Contrary to the expectation that older adults would do the same things as young adults, only slower and less efficiently, the paper concludes that the difference is actually in the way the Web is approached by the two selected groups; for example, older adults navigate the Web with different activities than young adults. The experiment comprises 28 subjects of ages between 18 and 73. The main hypothesis to be validated is that the activities of younger and older Web users will differ when local, short-term, and non-goal-oriented behaviors are concerned. The difference in behavior is noticeable when browsing complex sites with alternative paths to the same destination. This is based on the evidence that older adults have to compensate for age-related cognitive deficits, such as attention span, working memory, reaction time, and information processing speed. The subjects of the experiment were given a problem-solving task and an identical Web environment. The navigation patterns of the participants were observed in a very detailed and seamless manner, building graphs of the taken paths. The results of the experiment show that older adults would go down paths with detailed step-by-step guidance through the browsing process and would persevere when obtaining unsatisfactory answers until finding the good ones. The activities undertaken by older or younger adults, as well as by more or less experienced Web users did not affect the success of the problem solving. The percentage of subjects who completed the task successfully was 46.4 percent, whereas 53.6 percent failed to complete the assignment, with no correlation to age or experience. Thus, the main conclusion of the experiment is that different age groups, when working on similar tasks, perform different activities on the Web without impacting the success of the task resolution. This observation is seen as an important hint and instrument for Web page designers, indicating the need for Web-user-segment-centric Web page design. An interesting contribution to human factor research, with a wealth of relevant references, this paper is a curious finding and initiation into user analytics, geared toward Web page design. It would be of interest to see the results of such experiments performed on a larger subject base. Online Computing Reviews Service
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