DATE: September 09, 2008

CONTACT: Richard Pak, 864-656-1584
richpak@clemson.edu

WRITER: Amanda Brock, 864-656-5970
brock4@clemson.edu

EXPERT: Richard Pak

Researcher hopes to make Web more friendly to older adults

CLEMSON — Research at Clemson University holds the promise of making the World Wide Web a user-friendly place for everyone, young and old.

Richard Pak, an assistant professor of psychology, has received a $50,000 gift from Google to study how older adults navigate the Web and what Web site design features make searches easier. The grant will fund an extension of his research on aging and technology.

“The study of cognitive aging is all about finding out how our minds change as we get older. The results from decades of research are that some things get worse but also that some things improve with age,” Pak said. “For example, our ability to solve abstract problems might get worse as we get older. However, at the same time, other things get better as we get older. Just by virtue of being alive longer, we ‘know’ more information.”

Pak said one example is seen in a well-known finding in the cognitive aging literature. That finding is that older adults, those age 60 and over, have better verbal abilities and general knowledge than younger adults between 18 and 27.

Pak’s recently published paper, “Designing an information search interface for younger and older adults,” compiled his research into how these strengths might be applied to Web navigation.

“The findings are that when you take a Web site and organize it hierarchically — like how you might organize your documents on your computer with folders within folders — older adults are much slower and make more errors when they are searching for information compared to younger adults,” Pak said. “We think that this is the case because the situation does not allow older adults to use their greater knowledge toward the situation. However, when you take that same Web site and organize it around keywords or concepts instead of folders, older adults are able to bring their wealth of general knowledge to the situation and perform almost equivalently to younger adults in the task.”

That is, older adults seem to perform better using so-called "tag-based sites," which are Web sites that organize their information around frequently used keywords. Pak said that while tag-based sites are still relatively new, several popular sites use tags. These include Amazon.com, Gmail.com, and the photo sharing Web site Flickr.com.

Pak said that future research into the topics of older adults’ Web use will combine objective measures, such as bringing participants into the lab to observe how many navigation errors they make, with subjective measures such as interviews and focus groups aimed at determining why older adults have trouble with technology.

“Of course, this research couldn’t happen without the willingness of older adults from the community. When we have new studies, we call our list of older adults from the area and they are always more than happy to come in to do a study,” Pak said.

Ultimately, he hopes that his work will help make Web navigation a better experience for participants like these.

“While my results are a bit far from direct application and more research is needed, eventually I’d like to figure out how to design an information-retrieval interface that is usable for people of all ages,” Pak said. “Accessing information online is rapidly moving from convenience to necessity and if we don’t tackle issues of access, the existing digital divide will only get greater.”

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