Research On The Usability Of Public Facilities For Elderly Based On Metacognition

With the progress of society and the development of human civilization,the world population has reached an unprecedented level of aging,especially in China,such a populous country.Considering the process and speed of China’s population aging,the elderly population will reach 1/3 of the population by 2050.On the one hand,the aging of the population is not just a social phenomenon,but also that bringing problems and challenges to the world can not be underestimated.On the other hand,the development of science and technology improved people’s quality of life.More and more intelligent products appeared to our lives.Public facilities are no exception,such as self-help registration machines,self-service ticket machines,cash machines and so on.There is such a contradiction for the elderly: they are eager to use intelligent products,however they are fear to use because of no able to operate them.Based on the analysis of related literature and data,it is found that the utilization rate of public intellectual products is very low for the elderly.In this paper,we taken the state of using public facilities for the elderly as the foothold,chose the railway self-service ticket terminal interface as the research object,and designed the usability evaluation experiment of railway self-service ticket terminal interface based on meta-cognitive theory.Introducing meta-cognitive theory into usability research is one of the major innovations,but also a major difficulty.The results show that the usability of the existing self-service terminals is poor for the elderly.By analyzing and summarizing the usability of the self-service machines which the old users do not like or do not use,we got conclusions:(1)Compared with the young people,the frequency of using intelligent products for the elderly is lower.Therefore,the elderly is easier to produce negative emotions,even contradiction,before operating product.(2)The elderly operational capacity and learning ability are weaker than the young’s.Cumbersome operating procedures and ambiguous navigation will make them unaware of the operation.(3)The elderly pay more attention to the functionality of the product interface.Non-functional information will determine the next step interfere with the operation,and affectingoperational efficiency.(4)For the elderly,the habitual operation can help them to increase self-confidence of operating product.The new modes of operation are not easy to accepted or re-developed habits by them.(5)The elderly visual resolution decreased,whose ability of distinguishing the interface elements,such as the size and the color is lower than the young people.The similar color and the Boundary blurred button may lead to a decline in effective hits.(6)In addition,the study also found that most of the elderly are willing to talking.It is recommended in the experiment to select the experimental method such as the method of interview.In this paper,the user interface design criteria for the elderly are established for the usability problems found in the usability evaluation experiments.Including user characteristics,functionality,consistency,explicit navigation,effective feedback,interface simplification,and visual clarity,operational fault tolerance,and setting the shortcut path.In order to verify the feasibility of the interface design criterion for the elderly,the SUS scale was used to make a comparison questionnaire between the old interface and the new one.According to the results of questionnaire analysis,we got the Conclusion: it is feasible of the interface design criteria for the elderly that we established.