The Impact of Senior-Friendliness Guidelines on Seniors´ Use of Personal Health Records

Usability is a key determinant of the adoption and use of Personal Health Record (PHR) by seniors. Usability principles exist to guide developers in the creation of senior-friendly PHRs. The purpose of this study is to understand why seniors still perceive the usability of PHRs as low in spite of these publicly available guidelines. 16 PHRs were evaluated with a senior-focused website usability guideline to assess developers´ level of compliance. We found that though there are usability issues that need to be improved upon by PHR developers, some of the PHRs should be usable and senior-friendly. To understand the discrepancy between results of heuristic or guideline-based evaluation and reports from actual use, we contend that a need to assess existing usability standards for their suitability in guiding the creation of senior-friendly PHRs exist.