“Where is history”: Toward Designing a Voice Assistant to help Older Adults locate Interface Features quickly

Older adults often struggle to locate a function quickly in feature-rich user interfaces (UIs). Mobile UIs not only pack a ton of features in a small screen but also get frequent updates to their visual layouts—thereby exacerbating the problem. This paper explores a design solution where users could search for a UI feature using spoken-word queries. We investigated: 1) what type of questions older users ask when facing interaction challenges in unfamiliar scenarios, 2) how those query types compare with younger users’ inquiries, and 3) how older adults use a voice assistant design probe in a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) study. Results reveal five query types when verbally articulating interaction issues: validation, directed and undirected informational, navigational, and conceptual. In the WoZ study, older users typically asked for help following a series of non-unique or off-task feature selections (n = 13/15), and in 77% of those instances, they completed the task in the next interaction.