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Reflections on Working with Older Adults in Visualization Research
Zack While
TL;DR
Visualization research has limited methodological guidance for including older adults, despite their growing population and the fragmentation of relevant findings. This paper reflects on multiple empirical studies to synthesize practical lessons, reporting similar accuracy but longer completion times among older adults and identifying directions for broader, more inclusive methods.
Problem
Older adults are increasingly important to visualization research, but relevant findings are fragmented and established research practices may not address aging populations’ needs and experiences.
Method
The paper synthesizes methodological lessons from a dissertation’s multiple human-subject studies with older adults across online, in-person, and replication contexts.
Results
Older adults generally achieved approximately the same accuracy as younger adults but required more time across several visualization tasks, types, and experimental settings.
Takeaways & Limitations
Researchers should account for older adults’ heterogeneity, report completion time alongside accuracy, and adapt recruitment, communication, study settings, and participant interactions.
Takeaways & Limitations
Many studies used online or Amherst-area samples that tended toward higher education and greater technology and visualization familiarity, limiting representativeness.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
While older adults represent a growing proportion of the global population, their presence in visualization research remains limited. In this paper, I present reflections from a series of human-subject studies conducted with older adults as part of a multi-year research effort. These studies include a controlled laboratory experiment, online evaluations, and an in-situ investigation with participants above age 60. Based on these experiences, I provide methodological takeaways for conducting visualization research with older participants and propose directions for future work. This work ultimately aims to provide practical guidance and encourage broader inclusion of older adults as participants in visualization research.
1 INTRODUCTION
Older adults are an increasingly important population for visualization research, yet established methods may not address their needs. Drawing on multiple human-subject studies, the paper synthesizes methodological lessons for conducting research with older adults.
- Population aging and longer workforce participation increase the relevance of designing technologies, including visualizations, for older adults.
- Poor technology design can hinder older adults’ adoption of tools intended to support quality of life.
- The paper responds to a need for methodological guidance because established visualization practices may not account for aging populations’ needs and experiences.
- It synthesizes lessons from multiple human-subject studies to guide researchers and encourage further visualization research with older adults.
2 RELATED WORK
Prior GerontoVis research examines aging-related perceptual, cognitive, and design considerations, but findings remain fragmented. The paper contextualizes its methodological reflections through several empirical studies involving older adults.
- Existing visualization research addresses aging-related working memory, cognitive load, spatial processing, visualization selection, narrative, and interpretive scaffolding.
- Older adults may contribute accumulated knowledge that manifests in visualization literacy and preferences for particular designs.
- Findings across domains, authors, and design considerations remain fragmented, motivating broader methodological reflection.
- The glanceable study replicated prior work using bar, donut, and radial visualizations with 7, 12, and 24 data points across young-old and old-old groups.
- The task–visualization study examined aging across low-level tasks and visualization types using Bayesian modeling of population- and individual-level differences.
- The research also included focus groups analyzing older adults’ experiences with embedded information displays in a retirement home.
3 LESSONS LEARNED
The studies reveal methodological lessons about heterogeneity, recruitment, task timing, study setting, participant comfort, and replication. Older adults often showed similar accuracy but needed more time, while online and in-person methods exposed different aspects of their experience.
- 3.1 Heterogeneity and Individual Differences: More than 85% of younger adults shared ranked task groups, whereas older adults’ highest shared proportion reached only 67%, indicating greater heterogeneity.Among older adults, the five most-common middle-ranked task groups were shared by 10%, 10%, 11%, 15%, and 35% of participants.
- 3.1 Heterogeneity and Individual Differences: Wider confidence intervals and differences between young-old and old-old subgroups suggest that older adults should not be treated as a homogeneous group.The paper recommends separate analysis of commonly used age groups when sample sizes permit.
- 3.2 Participant Recruitment: In-person recruitment benefited from physical community spaces, direct interaction, trusted communication, and scheduling flexibility for transportation or caregiving needs.Participants often preferred phone calls for initial discussions, email for scheduling, and local phone numbers for contact.
- 3.3 Task Completion Time Across Age Groups: Older adults achieved approximately the same accuracy as younger adults but generally required more time across tasks, visualization types, and experimental settings.The paper recommends collecting and reporting completion times alongside accuracy and accounting for potentially longer task durations.
- 3.3 Task Completion Time Across Age Groups: A radial-24 visualization on a 1.6-inch screen was difficult for some participants to focus on over extended periods, so they were allowed to skip it.
- 3.4 Online and In-Person Studies Offer Complementary Insights: In-person studies provided contextual insights, while online studies enabled efficient access to larger samples of technology-comfortable older adults.Online participants were often highly computer literate, raising questions about how representative they were of the broader aging population.
- 3.4 Online and In-Person Studies Offer Complementary Insights: Arrow-key input caused discomfort, leading researchers to replace it with two separate keys that participants could position more comfortably.
- 3.5 Considerations for Replication: Conceptual replications with only older adults complicated age-based comparisons because experimental setups, recruitment, and contexts differed from original studies.Recruiting younger and older adults within the same study would provide a stronger basis for evaluating age-related differences and generalizability.
4 FUTURE WORK
Future GerontoVis work should broaden participant diversity and examine whether accuracy and time adequately capture older adults’ visualization experiences. The paper calls for improved recruitment, engagement, measures, and study protocols.
- Many studies drew from online or Amherst-area samples with relatively high education and technology or visualization familiarity.Future research should test generalizability to older adults with more diverse backgrounds and life experiences.
- Future work should develop recruitment and engagement approaches that better support participation from underrepresented older-adult populations.
- Because the work primarily measured accuracy and time, future evaluations should examine memorability, attention, trust, confidence, cognitive workload, and interaction burden.
- GerontoVis may require methodological examination of whether existing evaluation techniques suffice or whether new measures and study protocols are needed.
5 CONCLUSION
The paper distills lessons from a dissertation on conducting data visualization human-subject studies with older adults. It also identifies logistical and methodological observations and future research directions to assist researchers in GerontoVis.
- The reflection draws on empirical results from a dissertation focused on data visualization human-subject studies with older adults.
- It reports logistical and methodological observations about designing and conducting studies with older adults.These are framed as lessons the author wished they had known beforehand.
- The paper proposes ideas for future work in visualization research involving older adults.The stated goal is to assist future researchers interested in GerontoVis.