Tipper: Contextual Tooltips that Provide Seniors with Clear, Reliable Help for Web Tasks.

Most senior citizens in the U.S. use the Internet on a regular basis yet frequently run into basic issues they cannot solve themselves. We conducted contextual inquiry with 6 participants and an online survey with 25 participants to determine the difficulties and frustrations these users face. From the research findings we designed Tipper, a browser-based system to provide contextual help for seniors on the Web. Usability testing shows Tipper to be a simple yet powerful solution to make seniors more competent and comfortable on the Web. This paper reports the current progress of Tipper and indicates our future direction.