Trade-offs in the Design of Multimodal Interaction for Older Adults
This work addresses design challenges for older adults in human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature and presents specific trade-offs without introducing new methods.
The paper identifies and discusses four key trade-offs in designing multimodal interaction technology for older adults, illustrating two of them with user studies on mid-air and speech-based tablet interactions to highlight design choices and their consequences.
This paper presents key aspects and trade-offs that designers and Human-Computer Interaction practitioners might encounter when designing multimodal interaction for older adults. The paper gathers literature on multimodal interaction and assistive technology, and describes a set of design challenges specific for older users. Building on these main design challenges, four trade-offs in the design of multimodal technology for this target group are presented and discussed. To highlight the relevance of the trade-offs in the design process of multimodal technology for older adults, two of the four reported trade-offs are illustrated with two user studies that explored mid-air and speech-based interaction with a tablet device. The first study investigates the design trade-offs related to redundant multimodal commands in older, middle-aged and younger adults, whereas the second one investigates the design choices related to the definition of a set of mid-air one-hand gestures and voice input commands. Further reflections highlight the design trade-offs that such considerations bring in the process, presenting an overview of the design choices involved and of their potential consequences.