Toward Understanding the Experiences of People in Late Adulthood with Embedded Information Displays in the Home

TL;DR

This study explores how late adults experience embedded information displays on home appliances, highlighting usability challenges and strategies to improve equitable design for this demographic.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into the usability issues faced by late adults with EIDs and emphasizes the need for more equitable design considerations.

Findings

Poor labels hinder information intake

Unintuitive steps complicate device interaction

Strategies used to overcome usability issues

Abstract

Embedded information displays (EIDs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous on home appliances and devices such as microwaves, coffee machines, fridges, or digital thermostats. These displays are often multi-purpose, functioning as interfaces for selecting device settings, communicating operating status using simple visualizations, and displaying notifications. However, their usability for people in the late adulthood (PLA) development stage is not well-understood. We report on two focus groups with PLA (n = 11, ages 76-94) from a local retirement community. Participants were shown images of everyday home electronics and appliances, answering questions about their experiences using the EIDs. Using open coding, we qualitatively analyzed their comments to distill key themes regarding how EIDs can negatively affect PLA's ability to take in information (e.g., poor labels) and interact with these devices (e.g., unintuitive steps) alongside strategies employed to work around these issues. We argue that understanding the equitable design and communication of devices' functions, operating status, and messages is important for future information display designers. We hope this work stimulates further investigation into more equitable EID design.