Dr Paul Curzon

Designing for Older People

With Gill Whitney, Judy Wilson and Suzette Keith at Middlesex University Interaction Design Centre I am investigating interaction design issues relating to older people.

Use of E-government Web Sites by Older People

An initial pilot study has looked at attitudes of older people to e-government web sites. We used a scenario based approach observing participants in a natural setting using the web to find e-government forms and other information. This was followed up with interviews to probe their attitudes and strategies for finding information local government information, as well as what they considered important in a strategy to find such information. The participants had strong, successful existing information retrieval skills and often tried to adapt them within the web setting. The web environment raised many problems that made the tasks problematic to perform. Time was not the only criteria of importance and the web in general rated quite poorly. They had a none-work based perspective on time that altered their approach. Other issues such as avoiding social exclusion and using strategies they were familiar with were also important.

Publications

P. Curzon, S. Keith, G. Whitney and J. Wilson (2004) "Strategies for finding government information by older people", User Interfaces for All, 8th ERCIM Workshop. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3196, Springer.
P. Curzon, S. Keith, G. Whitney and J. Wilson (2004) "Information Seeking Strategies used by older people", HCI and the older population, workshop at HCI2004, Design for Life: The 18th British HCI Group Annual conference. pdf