Mobile Ageci: Potential Challenges In The Development And Evaluation Of Mobile Applications For Elderly People

Designing mobile applications for elderly users can be very challenging. Their heterogeneous prior knowledge and abilities make user-centered design processes difficult. For that reasons, some measures are necessary to make the applications usable the majority of elderly people and to get useful feedback during the evaluation. In this paper, we summarize central challenges we faced during the user-centered development of a mobile fitness application for seniors. We address differences in interaction, trust issues, fears, functional complexity, and aspects of motivation. Based on these experiences, we present suggestions that can be useful for the future development and evaluation of mobile (fitness) applications for elderly people.