Deriving the Design Requirements to Make Mobile Apps Accessible for Older Adults

A lot of mobile apps are not accessible to older adults, who are not the target audience when these apps are designed. However, mobile apps are critical to people’s lives, including older adults. In this research, we take one mobile app as an example and investigate the challenges older adults have when interacting with similar mobile apps. Specifically, we collect survey responses from 137 people, from which we summarize the challenges and design requirements for the mobile app to be accessible to older adults. We then created a high-fidelity prototype of a redesign of the mobile app implementing the design requirements we identified. We then evaluated the redesign with 3 users and collected their feedback on the usability and accessibility of the redesigned version of the app.