A Case Study on the Design of Touchscreen-Based User Interfaces for Multilingual Older Adults from Southeast Asian Backgrounds

There is limited research on design guidelines for multilingual older adults, especially those with dementia, and from Southeast Asian backgrounds. In this paper, we investigate usability issues and user experience of a touchscreen-based dual-language cognitive intervention tool with cognitively healthy older adults and older adults in early stages of dementia from multilingual backgrounds. We present the iterative design and development process of our dual-language intervention tool, including usability and user experience testing with multilingual older adults. Our observations of usability issues and user experience during testing of the intervention tool with older adults primarily pertain to (a) language, (b) motivation, and (c) user interaction. From the observed needs, we derived preliminary design guidelines for touchscreen-based user interfaces. Our observations and preliminary design guidelines for touchscreen-based user interfaces are significant due to their focus on the needs of multilingual users older adults from Southeast Asian backgrounds.