Research And Design Of Mobile Interface Based On Cognitive Characteristics For Older People

Mobile phone has become a necessary of the daily life along with the development of the mobile communication technology. The increasing potential of population aging has strengthened the attention of our society to the older people's mobile phone market. Since various functions are integrated into the mobile phone, the interface of the mobile phone becomes more complex, as well as the operation becomes more difficult. For the young people, multi-functional and polychrome mobile phone enriches their life; however, this type of mobile phone does not coincidence with the older people's cognitive characteristics. Thus, the research and design of the older people's mobile phone becomes a focus of many researchers. At present, the research is focused on the individual physiological or psychological characteristics of the older people, such as the setting of first aid button, the adding of shortcut key and zoom in the screen font, the discussions of comprehensive cognitive process are still absent.The cognitive process is the information processing stage of the brain. The cognitive process of using mobile phone can be described as the processing of the information acquired from mobile phone by the brain, which forming the operation instructions and further operation actions to the mobile phone. Various cognitive aspects are involved in this process, such as apperception, attention, memory, leaning and thinking etc. The aging cognitive psychology believes that human's apperception, attention and memory are degenerating with the increasing aging. Even in the same process, young man can complete operations successfully, while the older people cannot. For instance, it may be impossible for the older people to pick up relative information from the memory system.By the analysis of the present older people's mobile phone, the interface design method of the mobile phone is proposed based on the older people's cognitive characteristics. This method supply necessary supplementary to the design method, and does not negate the previous method. In this paper, by the analysis of the cognitive characteristics of the older people and the interface characteristics of the mobile phone, the principle of the mobile phone interface design is proposed on three aspects, which are structure design, interaction design and vision design. Based on this principle,an interface system for older people's mobile phone is realized and evaluated. By the evaluating of the usability, the efficiency and rationality of the proposed interface design method of the older people's mobile phone is verified.