How Older Adults Struggle with Mobile Maps

Abstract

Keywords: older adults, mobile maps, accessibility, non-motor issues, information scent, visual saliency, think-aloud, qualitative study

1. Motivation

Mobile Maps as a Window into Older Adults' Mobile Accessibility

Using Google Maps is the most universal smartphone activity across all age groups — yet we know little about how older adults experience it. Unlike simplified lab tasks, mobile maps involve multi-step lookup and exploratory search, voice input, sharing, and frequently-changing UI layouts.

We chose not to study a simplified custom app. We wanted to examine how older adults tackle the complexities of a mainstream app, on their own devices, in their own settings.

2. Method

Ecologically Valid Think-Aloud Study

Pilot tests with surveys and diary studies failed — responses were shallow and diary reports showed family assistance. We shifted to a concurrent think-aloud protocol in participants' own settings, on their own devices, with no time limits.

3. Results

172 Interaction Problems Across Three Non-Motor Categories

105 motor issues and 67 non-motor issues were identified. Older adults encountered more motor issues, but spent more time troubleshooting non-motor issues, got more frustrated, and abandoned tasks 19 times — exclusively due to non-motor causes.

Inadequate Visual Saliency — "I don't see the buses"

UI components frequently went unnoticed despite participants already customizing fonts and contrast. Transit mode selectors, category navbars, and action buttons were missed entirely — not due to a lack of understanding of what they meant, but simply because they were not salient enough to attract attention.

Figure 1. Particular UI components often went unnoticed — transit modes above the map view (left) and navbar menu options (right). Participants knew what they were looking for; they just could not see it. (ASSETS 2020)

Ambiguous Affordances — "How do I put an address in this?"

In other instances participants noticed the correct UI component but could not use it. Card sliders were tapped rather than swiped, address fields were not recognized, and voice prompts were opened as a help mechanism rather than for input.

Figure 2. Ambiguous affordances: P8 tapped a card before swiping to bring it into focus; P11 pinched the map before swiping down a list; P3 tapped 'more' not realizing an address can be typed into the search box. (ASSETS 2020)

Low Information Scent — The Loop Problem

When problem-solving, older adults frequently went back-and-forth the same 3–4 pages and got stuck in a loop. In each recorded instance, the correct feature was always on one of the pages they kept revisiting — but they could not infer the next interaction step.

Figure 3. Three examples of older adults looping back-and-forth the same page sequence. The correct step was always visible on a page they had already seen. (ASSETS 2020, Fig. 3)

4. Design Implications

Two Proposed Solutions

• Find on Page Offer a text-search widget to find any UI component by name or label on the current page — invokable via a hardware button or always visible. This directly addresses visual saliency and information scent.
• Intercept All Input Events Program UI components to handle commonly confused input events; on repeated misuse, the app notifies the user how to correctly interact with the component.

These findings directly motivated the design of a voice assistant — since older adults could articulate what they wanted, a voice-based query mapped naturally onto a "Find on Page" concept at the platform level.