An Empirical Study on the Influence of Smart Home Interface Design on the Interaction Performance of the Elderly

Chengmin Zhou; Yingyi Dai; Ting Huang; Hanxiao Zhao; Jake Kaner

doi:10.3390/ijerph19159105

An Empirical Study on the Influence of Smart Home Interface Design on the Interaction Performance of the Elderly

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jul 26;19(15):9105. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19159105.

Authors

Chengmin Zhou^{1

2}, Yingyi Dai^{1

2}, Ting Huang^{1

2}, Hanxiao Zhao^{1

2}, Jake Kaner³

Affiliations

¹ College of Furnishings and Industrial Design, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China.
² Jiangsu Co-Innovation Center of Efficient Processing and Utilization of Forest Resources, Nanjing 210037, China.
³ School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK.

Abstract

The concept of the smart home has been widely recognized and accepted, but the differentiated characteristics of elderly smart products in terms of demand and use are becoming more and more prominent. The lack of an efficient navigation design of the smart product interface increases the cognitive burden of elderly users, and how to better meet the needs of the elderly with smart products gradually becomes the focus of attention. This study was conducted for the elderly group, using the scenario-based design method to analyze the needs of elderly users, combining the research results of scenario theory with the smart home interaction design research method, focusing on how to make the style of interface navigation, sliding layout and button size more suitable for the cognitive behavior of elderly users. The purpose of this research is to realize an age-friendly smart home interaction design in terms of functional design and interface design. The experiment is divided into two stages: in stage 1, two different layouts and operation methods are commonly used for the age-friendly smart home interface: up and down sliding and left and right sliding; in stage 2, the functional buttons are square, where 4 styles are selected, and the side lengths are set to 10 mm, 12 mm, 15 mm, 18 mm and 22 mm. The sliding and retrieval test and retrieval and click test results show that for different sliding layout methods, the interactive performance and subjective evaluation of the interface with the up-and-down sliding layout are better. Among all functional button styles, the interaction performance and subjective evaluation of the simple button style with lines are the best. Among the function keys with a size of 10-22 mm, the interaction performance is better from 12 mm to 18 mm. The conclusion of the better interface data information obtained from this experiment improves the rationality of the age-friendly smart home interface and makes the smart home interface better for the age-friendly scenario.

Keywords: age-friendly design; interaction performance; interface design; smart home.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Aged
Empirical Research*
Humans

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (2017YFD0601104), and part of it was supported by the 2022 Jiangsu Postgraduate “International Smart Health Furniture Design and Engineering” project, and a project from International Cooperation Joint Laboratory for Production, Education, Research and Application of Ecological Health Care on Home Furnishing.