Learning Processes of Touchscreen Gesture Interaction in Older Adults and Children

Touchscreen mobile computers, including smartphones, are widely used today by people of all ages across the globe, from children to senior citizens. In Japan, significant numbers of seniors, such as active ones, have begun to learn how to use computers, including smartphones and other touchscreen devices. The Global and Innovation Gateway for All School Program has allowed children to own and use such devices. Despite the availability of scientific knowledge on how children and seniors interact with smartphone applications, not all of them find it easy to manipulate mobile touchscreens. In this article, we establish brief best practices for designing touchscreen interfaces. First, we summarize the existing literature on touchscreen interaction with children and seniors and then measure their performance of gesture interaction. The tasks included basic gestures, such as taps, swipes, and pinching motions. The results showed that the older adults became significantly faster in tapping and swiping with repetition of the gesture interactions, while no such learning effect was observed in children. We also observed differences between the strategies of older adults and children in tapping and pinching in/out.