UsAge guidelines: Toward usable Saudi M-Government applications for elderly users

ABSTRACT

With the rapid adoption of digital transformation, the Saudi government launched several applications to provide many online services for citizens, especially under the circumstances imposed by COVID-19. As those applications were designed to service a wide spectrum of users, it is expected that some groups of users may face challenges regarding the usability of the applications. In particular, elderly users are expected to have difficulties while interacting with m-government applications due to the limitations imposed by the aging process, culture, and familiarity with technology. In the literature, there are some usability guidelines that describe how to design usable mobile applications for the elderly. Still, they rarely address differences in culture, cognitive and psychological abilities of the elderly, and the criticality of context in which a mobile application is used. Hence, in this paper, we propose a set of usability guidelines that are expected to enhance the usability of m-government applications for the elderly. The guidelines, called UsAge, cover three major aspects, which are elderly characteristics, culture, and context, that affect the usability of mobile applications. The guidelines were driven by conducting three usability evaluation methods on an m-government application usability testing with users, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristics evaluation. In addition, interviews with Saudi elderly individuals were conducted to extract their characteristics and define their limitations in using such applications. These characteristics are utilized to customize existing m-government application guidelines. The guidelines emerging from the two phases were combined and validated by experts, who found them feasible, correct, comprehensive, and understandable. In addition, they found that they are unique and do not overlap with existing guidelines. The outcome of this paper is the UsAge guidelines, which are a set of 28 new guidelines that are incorporated into existing m-government application usability guidelines. © 2022 The Author(s)