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Larger Chinese text spacing and size: effects on older users' experience

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-22, 12:56 authored by Guanhua Hou, Hua Dong, Weining Ning, Lianghao Han
With declining vision ability, character spacing and size on smartphones designed for the general population are not accessible for older adults. This study aimed to explore how larger Chinese character spacing and size affect older adults’ user experience (UX). An orthogonal experiment was conducted. The optimal range of font size (FS), word spacing (WS) and line spacing (LS) were proposed utilising subjective evaluations to investigate the correlation of eye movement data with participants perceived UX. The results showed that improvement in different aspects of UX varied when FS, WS and LS increased. Overall, participants preferred larger FS, WS and LS, however, the larger FS, WS and LS values are more likely to cause errors and slower reading speed. These results suggest that the distinct combination of size and spacing depends on the motivation, needs and situation of older people when reading on a smartphone. These findings will help designers to provide better design for the older people.

Funding

This work was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (grant number 17YJC760015) and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (grant number LGF18G010001).

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

Ageing and Society

Volume

40

Issue

2

Pages

389-411

Citation

HOU, G. ... et al, 2018. Larger Chinese text spacing and size: effects on older users' experience. Ageing & Society, doi:10.1017/S0144686X18001022.

Publisher

© Cambridge University Press

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Acceptance date

2018-07-12

Publication date

2018-08-28

Copyright date

2020

Notes

This article has been published in a revised form in Ageing & Society https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X18001022. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University Press.

ISSN

0144-686X

eISSN

1469-1779

Language

  • en