How older and younger adults differ in their approach to problem solving on a complex website

Abstract

Older adults differ from younger ones in the ways they experience the World Wide Web. For example, they tend to move from page to page more slowly, take more time to complete tasks, make more repeated visits to pages, and take more time to select link targets than their younger counterparts. These differences are consistent with the physical and cognitive declines associated with aging. The picture that emerges has older adults doing the same sorts of things with websites as younger adults, although less efficiently, less accurately and more slowly. This paper questions that view. We present new findings that show that, to accomplish their purposes, older adults may systematically undertake different activities and use different parts of websites than younger adults. We examined how a group of adults 18 to 73 years of age moved through a complex website seeking to solve a specific problem. We found that the users exhibited strong age-related tendencies to follow particular paths and visit particular zones while in pursuit of a common goal. We also assessed how experience with the web may mediate these tendencies. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of the finding that users' characteristics not only affect how they navigate but what activities they undertake along the way. Copyright 2008 ACM.