Remote User Testing for an Age-Friendly Interface Design for Smart Homes

da Silva, A. M.; Ayanoglu, H.; Silva, B.

The age group of 65 years has been described as the fastest growing demographic in the world. As life expectancy increases, older adults prefer to remain independent at home. Smart Home systems and Assistive Technologies have been developed to enable older adults to live in their own homes as they age, enhancing safety, independence and quality of life. Although considerable Smart Home mobile applications exist focused on older adult’s wellbeing, they still face considerable challenges in usability, feasibility and accessibility regarding design of interfaces. There is a gap in recent research on evaluation of User Interface (UI) designed or adapted to address older adults needs and abilities. The paper takes part of an ongoing project evaluation stage, for a smart home and health monitoring system, applied in two stages: (i) heuristic evaluation and (ii) remote user testing. The main objective of the paper is to focus on the second evaluation stage, that took place with end users, applying unmoderated remote usability testing, due to Covid-19 pandemic. According to the System Usability Scale (SUS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) techniques it could be able to quantify the users experience and measure the level of satisfaction related to the smart home and health monitoring system. The SUS results identified that the system’s usability was considered acceptable with a final score of 65,6. It was concluded that the unmoderated test with a SUS post-questionnaire can be a complex method to apply with older adults. The SUS questionnaire could lead to mistakes and misinterpretation, some contradictory results could be related to this complexity among older adults, and this could lead to a major impact on overall SUS scores. In addition, the NPS metric was identified as not the appropriate to measure user satisfaction with a small sample of users as SUS technique. It is concluded that findings should be supported by applying individual moderated tests with more end users to provide insights to designers and developers to create more usable interfaces to address the needs and abilities of the older adults. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.