Visualizations for self-reflection on mouse pointer performance for older adults

Aging causes physical and cognitive changes that influence how we interact with the world around us. As personal data becomes increasingly available from a variety of sources, older adults can use this information to better understand these changes and adapt. Our project explores information visualization as a tool to help older adults interpret and understand their own personal data. To test this concept, we created visualizations of user's pointer performance metrics to help demystify problems in real-world mouse use. In a user study conducted with older adults with a range of computing experience, we learned that visualizations such as these can be a highly engaging information medium for this population. This paper presents our value-driven design process and recommendations for visualizations for older adults.