Manuals for the Elderly: Which Information Cannot Be Missed?'

Elderly people seem to encounter more problems than people from other age groups do, when using consumer-electronics products and their accompanying manuals. This may be due to the absence of some kinds of information. In this study effects of the absence of different information types in instructions on action performance were explored for different age groups. Younger (aged 20-30 y.) and elderly (aged 60-70 y.) participants installed a VCR with the help of the manual, while working aloud. The absence of goal-information, consequence-information and identification-information in the instructions proved to have a negative effect on task performance, especially for the elderly participants. When one of these information types was absent in the instructions the elderly performed more actions incorrectly than when the information was stated explicitly. Many people who ever bought a consumer electronics device and tried to get it to work with the help o f the instructions, ended up criticizing the manual. Many users can’t make head or tail o f manuals, but elderly people seem to encounter even more problems with instructions that accompany complex products. Within the next few decades almost half o f the population in the western world will be older than 50. As a consequence, consumer electronics devices will be used more and more by elderly people. This prospect urges interface designers and document designers to think about improvements in the design o f the devices and the accompanying manuals, in order to make sure that they are more usable for both elderly and younger people. In the last few years in several gerontechnological studies important steps have been made towards a better balance between technology and elderly people. Hartley (1) for example has given an inventory o f rules o f thumb for designing instructional text for elderly people. Both T.D. Freudenthal (2) and A. Freudenthal (3) studied elderly people’s behavior in interaction with complex devices in order to identify characteristics o f the device that cause problems and characteristics o f elderly people’s behavior that might explain their problems. Wright (4) investigated the use o f instructions by elderly readers. This article attempts to contribute to the identification o f sources o f elderly users’ problems with electronic devices. The experiment described in this article is part o f a research project that is intended to lead to guidelines and advice for designing manuals that fit the needs o f elderly people. The first step in the project is to determine text features that appear to help or hinder 1 This research project is supported by the Co-operation Centre o f Tilburg and Eindhoven Universities.