How Can We Make IT Devices Easy for Older Adults? Effects of Repetitive Basic Operation Training and Help-Guidance on Learning of Electronic Program Guide System.

Older adults have difficulties in using unfamiliar IT appliances because they look poor to learn operations in trial-and-error fashion. To find a different way for older adults to learn operations effectively, an experiment like usability testing with Electronic Program Guide (EPG) system on a HDD/DVD recorder was executed. Unfocused general information was not helpful for learning new operations. Repeated practice of basic operations with timely help-guidance messages facilitated the acquisition of targeted elementary actions and made them easy to learn new elementary actions as well as new complicated operations. It was suggested that older adults could learn better from successful operations than from trial-and-errors, which may induce harmful error spiral. It is necessary to investigate how to avoid error spiral in self-learning environment in home use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]