Manuals for the elderly: text characteristics that help or hinder older users

The elderly seem to encounter more problems than most other users when operating modern devices and processing the accompanying instructions. In a rapidly greying society and a growing grey digital divide, it is useful to investigate how instructions can be optimized to meet the needs of elderly users and to make modern technology more accessible to the elderly. In this research project we have looked at differences between age groups, at effects of textual variants and at interactions between these factors. An exploratory investigation indicated that in instructions iconicity, the signaling of steps and the presence of goal and consequence information affect older people´s task performance. This article reports three experiments, which investigated these factors more thoroughly. All three experiments included an older and a younger age group. In all three experiments age effects were found: the elderly needed more time and made more errors than the younger participants. In experiment one, iconicity and different types of signaling were investigated. Participants were exposed to simulations of procedures, which they had to judge on correctness. Unexpectedly, neither of the age groups was affected by the text variants. Experiment two investigated iconicity in more detail. Participants performed iconic and non-iconic instructions. Iconicity turned out to have an effect, and there was an interaction with age, but the results were opposite to what was expected. In the third experiment, effects of goal and consequence information were investigated. Participants performed instructions in which goal or consequence information was present or absent. In this experiment, the absence of consequence information hampered task performance in the older age group.