Age-related differences in performance with touchscreens compared to traditional mouse input
856 views · Published 5 June 2013 · 0:31 · Indexed 22 September 2026
Channel: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) · 2013 · Science & Technology
Full Title: Age-related differences in performance with touchscreens compared to traditional mouse input Authors: Leah Findlater, Jon E. Froehlich, Kays Fattal, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Tanya Dastyar Abstract: Despite the apparent popularity of touchscreens for older adults, little is known about the psychomotor performance of these devices. We compared performance between older adults and younger adults on four desktop and touchscreen tasks: pointing, dragging, crossing and steering. On the touchscreen, we also examined pinch-to-zoom. Our results show that while older adults were significantly slower than younger adults in general, the touchscreen reduced this performance gap relative to the desktop and mouse. Indeed, the touchscreen resulted in a significant movement time reduction of 35% over the mouse for older adults, compared to only 16% for younger adults. Error rates also decreased. URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2470703 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470703
