Navigating the Mobile Applications: The Influence of Interface Metaphor and Other Factors on Older Adults’ Navigation Behavior

The interface metaphor was suggested to facilitate a user’s mental model development while navigating, whereas its effectiveness is still unknown among the group of older adults. We developed an experiment to investigate how older adults navigate the mobile interfaces with and without metaphors, by evaluating the possible effects of users’ perceptual speed, task complexity, content similarity, and other related user characteristics in an integrated fashion. Results indicated that the use of interface metaphor could assist in the older adults’ navigation performance, but only for those with a higher level of perceptual speed. Additionally, we found that the older adult’s navigation behavior was significantly influenced by the task complexity, content similarity and the users’ level of technology experience. These findings can help researchers and practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of interface metaphor on older adults’ mobile navigation behavior by identifying the possible influential factors and interpreting the behind reasons.