The relevance of temporal iconicity with instruction manuals for elderly users.
Gerontolinguistic obtains a growing importance with the increase of elderly users due to Demographic Change. Since acceptance and ease of use of supportive systems for elderly, such as "E-Nursing-Assistants", are highly dependent on the age suitable design of readable instructions, an age-appropriate linguistic concept is of high value for usability. There has been only little research on the relevance of foreign words, signal words, textual arrangement, optical accentuation of key terms and temporal iconicity concerning older users. Thus, an efficient design of age suitable manual instructions within a medical context still remains to be done. The objective of this research was to evaluate the relevance of the previously mentioned factors in the context of written instructions. For this, an empirical survey was designed which was given to 45 study participants. The subjects of the experiment were given 4x3 instructions after a pretest questionnaire. The aim was to execute these instructions as correctly and quickly as possible. Furthermore the instructions were rated regarding comprehensibility with a retrospective questionnaire.
Chair and Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics of RWTH Aachen University, Bergdriesch 27, Aachen, Germany. a.mertens@iaw.rwth-aachen.de
Alexander
A
Mertens
Claudia
C
Nick
Stefan
S
Krüger
Christopher M
CM
Schlick
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D032882:Comprehension; D036262:Empirical Research; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008370:Manuals as Topic; D008875:Middle Aged; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014584:User-Computer Interface