Fewer Steps the Better? Instructing Older Adults’ Learning and Searching in Smartphone Apps

This study challenges the common rule of thumb, fewer steps the better, in the context of older adults' learning of smartphone apps under remote support. During the learning of new apps, a predominant problem is that older adults easily get lost. Therefore, this study examined various information structures and proposed two types of instructions in two experiments. In the first experiment, twenty-four older adults learned to use smartphone apps with three information structures through step-by-step instruction or metaphorical instruction. Compared with step-by-step instruction, the metaphorical instruction contributed to greater ease of learning and shorter task completion time. However, the advantage of metaphorical instruction over step-by-step instruction depended on the information structure. Older adults' performance of learning the information structure 2 × 2 were poorer than that of learning the information structure 4 × 1 or 1 × 4, which might imply that fewer steps is not necessarily better. To further test the finding, the second experiment was conducted among 30 older adults who learned to use smartphone apps with five information structures (28, 44, 41 + 82, 82 + 41, and 162). The results indicated that the advantage of fewer interaction steps depends on preview size. The highest number of interaction steps with the fewest number of preview size, 28, contributed to best learning performance of older adults.