Seniors and text messaging on mobile touchscreen phones

Abstract

We studied how senior citizens write and send text messages on their own mobile phone and two touchscreen smartphones. Each participant participated in three training sessions and wrote messages with three phones. We found that the range of text entry performance among seniors is large. Average text entry rate in entering a 34 character test phrase was only 3.5 wpm. Further work to improve text messaging user interfaces for older un-skilled users is clearly needed.