Synapse: Interactive Guidance by Demonstration with Trial-and-Error Support for Older Adults to Use Smartphone Apps
Xiaofu Jin, Xiaozhu Hu, Xiaoying Wei, Mingming Fan

TL;DR
Synapse is an interactive, app-independent mobile guidance system designed to help older adults learn smartphone app tasks through multimodal tutorials and trial-and-error support, improving confidence and motivation.
Contribution
This paper introduces Synapse, a novel interactive tutorial system tailored for older adults that combines demonstration and trial-and-error support on smartphones.
Findings
Synapse outperformed traditional video tutorials in user support.
Participants felt more confident and motivated using Synapse.
The system effectively supports older adults in learning app tasks.
Abstract
As smartphones are widely adopted, mobile applications (apps) are emerging to provide critical services such as food delivery and telemedicine. While bring convenience to everyday life, this trend may create barriers for older adults who tend to be less tech-savvy than young people. In-person or screen sharing support is helpful but limited by the help-givers' availability. Video tutorials can be useful but require users to switch contexts between watching the tutorial and performing the corresponding actions in the app, which is cumbersome to do on a mobile phone. Although interactive tutorials have been shown to be promising, none was designed for older adults. Furthermore, the trial-and-error approach has been shown to be beneficial for older adults, but they often lack support to use the approach. Inspired by both interactive tutorials and trial-and-error approach, we designed an…
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