"Maps are hard for me": Identifying How Older Adults Struggle with Mobile Maps
Ja Eun Yu, Debaleena Chattopadhyay · 2020 · ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3373625.3416997
Summary
This short paper from the University of Illinois at Chicago examines how older adults (aged 60+) use Google Maps on their own mobile devices and identifies the specific accessibility challenges they encounter. While smartphone ownership among US adults aged 65+ grew from 18% in 2013 to 53% in 2019, older adults continue to use fewer apps and fewer features than younger users. Mobile maps are particularly important for this population as they can support independent navigation, access to public transit information, and exploration of amenities — yet little research has examined how accessible mainstream mobile maps actually are for older users. The researchers conducted an ecologically valid qualitative study with 17 older adults (median age 68) in the metro-Chicago area. Unlike prior lab studies that used simplified custom apps, participants used their own devices with their existing Google Maps installations at locations of their choice. Three tasks of increasing complexity were designed: a simple lookup search for public transit directions, a constrained search requiring manual map navigation without GPS, and an exploratory search to find a nearby ice cream shop and share the result. Sessions were video-recorded with two cameras — one on the participant and one on the device screen — and participants used a concurrent think-aloud protocol to verbalize their thoughts during task execution.
Key findings
Across the 17 participants, 172 interaction problems were identified and coded as either motor issues (105) or non-motor issues (67). While motor issues such as mistaps, overshoots, and scrolling errors were more frequent, they were easily recovered from (median 2 seconds). Non-motor issues, however, were far more consequential — they took longer to resolve, caused maximum frustration, and led to participants abandoning tasks entirely (19 instances of resignation, all from non-motor issues). No participant gave up on a task due to a motor issue alone. Three sources of non-motor problems were identified. Inadequate visual saliency: UI components like transit mode tabs or food category navigation bars went completely unnoticed despite being on screen. One participant spent over 4 minutes trying to find bus options before giving up, never noticing the transit mode selector above the map. Ambiguous affordances: participants noticed UI elements but could not figure out how to use them correctly — tapping instead of swiping, pinching to zoom on a list instead of scrolling, or not understanding that a search box accepts typed addresses. Low information scent: participants could not determine what to do next, leading to looping behavior where they cycled through the same 3-4 pages repeatedly without progress, getting stuck because the correct next step was on a page they kept visiting but not engaging with. The authors connect these findings to cognitive aging research: the narrowing of the useful field of view with age may explain missed UI elements; declining fluid intelligence makes it harder to infer unfamiliar affordances; and difficulty filtering competing sensory information may explain why correct UI components on busy pages go unengaged. Two design solutions are proposed: "Find on Page" to let users search for UI components by text label, and "Intercept All Input Events" to detect repeated incorrect interactions and offer guidance.
Relevance
This research is significant because it shifts the focus of older adult mobile accessibility from motor issues (which have been well-studied) to the more impactful but less understood non-motor challenges. The finding that non-motor issues — not mistaps or tremor — are what actually cause older adults to give up on tasks has important implications for mobile app design. Simply making touch targets larger or adding gesture tolerance does not address the fundamental problems of elements being invisible, confusing, or providing insufficient navigational cues. For accessibility practitioners and mobile developers, the three-factor framework of inadequate visual saliency, ambiguous affordances, and low information scent provides a practical lens for evaluating any complex mobile interface, not just maps. These issues are likely to affect any multi-functional, multi-page mobile application. The study also demonstrates the value of ecological validity in accessibility research — using participants' own devices in natural settings revealed problems that controlled lab studies with simplified interfaces would miss. As the global population ages and mobile devices become increasingly essential for daily life, designing for the cognitive needs of older adults is not a niche concern but a mainstream accessibility imperative.
Tags: older adults · mobile accessibility · mobile maps · touchscreen · cognitive accessibility · visual saliency · affordances · information scent · usability