**1. Introduction**

Across the globe, the proportion of older adults (OAs) is on the rise [1]. For example, Ireland's OA population increased by 19% in recent years [2]. This situation reflects that in most countries lifestyles have improved, however it does go hand in hand with impacting long-term care and welfare systems [3]. There are various definitions for what constitutes an older adult, and of course there is not a

<sup>1</sup> **Tech-savvy OAs -** OAs who spend more than 8 hours during a week on their mobile phone and use basic functionality as well as mobile applications and wearables. Examples of mobile applications are WhatsApp, Podcast, Headspace, and wearables such as Fitbit.

particular day in which someone moves from being a younger or middle aged adult to an older adult [4]. For the purpose of our study, however, we define OAs as someone who has reached the age of 50, basing our work on established studies e.g. TILDA<sup>2</sup> [5]. Additional qualifications to be included in our study is that the OA is already motivated to use smartphone technology.

The quality of life of OAs can be considerably improved through active social engagement, improved healthcare, and increased mobility through access to transportation [6]. Technology offers a ray of hope in providing access to these opportunities. But, the adoption rate of technology by OAs appears low [7]. Technology comes in many forms, to include public displays, virtual reality, websites and smartphone applications. As numerous technologies may have a different set of design requirements, our focus will be on smartphone applications only – smartphones are frequently used by OAs [8]. Furthermore, smartphone applications can help to provide access to digital services with no or low-cost [9].

To develop smartphone applications for OAs, designers must recognise the individual needs of this group such as the varying degrees of physical and cognitive decline [10, 11] and privacy concerns [12]. These specific features are not always considered, and a recent study advocates for better recommendations for agefriendly design of user interfaces on mobile phones [13]. A tried and tested way to elicit such specific recommendations is through participatory or human-centred development [14]; shown as a successful way to develop such guidelines [15] and checklists [16, 17], and for interface design of mobile phones for older adults [18]. However, existing guidelines deal with visual and haptic issues and omit many elements associated with the textual interface. Additional shortcomings of these guidelines are that they are rarely tested [15, 18] and lack extensive empirical validation [19]. Also, the guidelines for designing applications for OAs are not presented to designers and developers in an accessible format [20] and are sometimes merged in the discussion section of the papers e.g., [19, 21, 22]. A recent literature review summed up existing guidelines as piecemeal, lacking in characterisation, not easily actionable, and rarely validated [23]. In summary, the conflicting and disparate advice offered, results in arguably unreliable and hard to follow guidelines.

In this chapter, we focus particularly on the Usability recommendations for smartphone applications, for designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying. Usability includes user experience design. In our context, usability covers general aspects that impact everyone and do not dis-proportionally impact people with disabilities [24]. Furthermore, we look for better ways to disseminate our guidelines by transferring the recommendations into a set of patterns. This form of reporting is shown to lead to increased adoption of guidelines by practitioners [23, 25, 26].

We respond to the call to create a design patterns library aimed towards practitioners and pedagogical settings [20].

In summary, a few attempts have been made by the research community to produce guidelines or checklists, but for the most part they have not been validated or applied in practice [27]. Also, their implicit nature lacks explanation on how to apply these recommendations. Henceforth, this research fills this void by providing a structured and validated set of design patterns to support the design and development of usable smartphone applications for tech-savvy OAs. Our study aims to answer:

**Research Question -** What do tech-savvy older adults expect from smartphone applications?

<sup>2</sup> The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, conducted at Trinity College: Dublin - URL: https://tilda.tcd.ie/

*Usability Recommendations for Designers of Smartphone Applications for Older Adults… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96775*

The next sections of this study are organised as follows. Section 2 describes the four different stages within the Research Methods and how the collected data was analysed. After that, Section 3 presents the results of execution of these stages and Section 4 depicts the transformation of findings i.e. recommendations in the form of design patterns. Section 5 then highlights how some of the threats to validity were catered for whilst conducting this research. Section 6 concludes this study and points towards potential future directions.
