Photo by Alfonso Otaegui

Nowadays many bureaucratical procedures can be done online. In just a couple of years, however, online will be the nearly only option in Chile. This paperless trend represents a challenge for older adults, as it pushes them to access the internet for everyday tasks that were simpler for them on paper, such as paying the bills or getting information on free activities for seniors.

Older adults constitute a significant component of the Chilean population, as the aging process of this South American country has continued. According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the percentage of people aged over 65 years or more grew from 6,6% in 1992 to 11,4% in 2017 (2.003.256 people). If we extend the age range to 60 years or more, the figures get even more significant. According to the National Service for Older Adults (SENAMA), 16,2% of Chile’s population is 60 years old or older (roughly around 2.800.000 people) (‘Censo 2017 reveló que (…)’ 2017).

The Chilean Senate has recently approved the bill of  “Transformación Digital en el Estado” (“Digital Transformation in the State”). This law aims at modernizing the functioning of the State. “We are in 2018 and we still handle most of our bureaucratical procedures on paper”, said President Sebastian Piñera in the letter accompanying the law proposal (‘Mensaje de S.E. el Presidente de la República (…)’ 2018: 2). The president encourages the use of electronic resources based on two main arguments: saving time and sparing paper. One of the main points of the bill is that most State bureaucratical procedures will have to be done in electronic form. This bill takes into account the fact that some people lack access to the required technology, and it gives to those people the chance of doing bureaucratical procedures on paper. However, this possibility is strictly exceptional. While the electronic form is the rule, the paper is an exception that will have to be requested and duly justified (ibid. 7).

So, how does this government initiative affect older adults? This 16% of the population needs to access the internet to become part of this ‘Digital Transformation.’ According to the Chilean Sub-secretary of Communications, 84,8% of the access to the internet in 2018 was done through mobile devices (93,4% of these devices were smartphones) (‘Conexiones 4G se disparan 35% en 2018 (…)’ 2019). This situation implies that older adults will need to master the smartphone to keep up with the proposed changes in the administration.

Learning to use a smartphone implies a challenge for older adults, at least on two fronts. Firstly, it implies an adaptation to a new type of user interface (UI). Mobile devices’ UIs are radically different from the electromechanical UIs found in the older technologies more familiar to older adults. While in older technologies’ UIs most –if not all– of the system functionality is accessible at once through buttons and switches, mobile devices’ UIs imply navigating several screens and contextual menus that display only a fraction of the whole system at a time (Docampo et al. 2001).

Secondly, this learning process requires proper guidance. In the smartphone workshops I volunteer, I often ask my students about the main obstacles they encounter in their learning experience. By far, the factor they complain the most about is that their younger family members lack the patience to teach them. “My daughter bought this phone for me –says a 63 years old lady– and taught me [how to use it] on the first day. After that, if I ask something, she says ‘I already taught you’!”. “When you ask them how to do something –explains a 67 years old man–, they do it very fast on your phone, ‘pa, pa, pa, it’s done!’, but they don’t show you how to do it”. Elderly students require self-paced learning, as they experience greater anxiety and frustration while learning to use new technology (Fisk et al. 2009).

If the Chilean government wants to include this important sector of the population in this ‘Digital Transformation,’ then it should develop public policies to address the unique learning needs of older people properly. In all fairness, there are several state-run cultural centers and public libraries in Santiago that offer free lessons for older adults –as the ones where I’ve been teaching. They have two constraints, unfortunately. On the one hand, there is a very limited number of places: in some cases, students are allowed to attend a workshop only once, as they have to leave the place to new students. These workshops usually last one month (with one or two classes a week), which is not enough for students of this age, who need various exercises over more extended periods (Fisk et al. 2009). On the other hand, the teacher-to-student ratio is not as high as it should be. The diversity of UIs across the whole spectrum of Android phones requires personalized teaching, as any procedure explained in front of the entire class has to be repeated with each student, to apply minor –yet fundamental– tweaks to each case.

Chile is pushing forward the paperless trend. A well planned public policy of digital alphabetization for older adults with specialized teachers would be then of the utmost importance to help the older ‘digital immigrants’ (Leung et al. 2012) to join the trend.

References

Censo 2017 reveló que más del 16% de la población chilena es adulto mayor. (2017, December 27). Retrieved from http://www.senama.gob.cl/noticias/censo-2017-revelo-que-mas-del-16-de-la-poblacion-chilena-es-adulto-mayor

Conexiones 4G se disparan 35% en 2018 y abre expectativas de cara al despliegue de 5G. (2019, April 10). Retrieved from https://www.subtel.gob.cl/conexiones-4g-se-disparan-35-en-2018-y-abre-expectativas-de-cara-al-despliegue-de-5g/

Docampo Rama, M., De Ridder, H., and B. Ouma , H. 2001. Technology generation and age in using layered user interfaces. Gerontechnol. 1, 1, 25–40.

Fisk, A. D., Rogers, W. A., Charness, N., Czaja , S. J., and Sharit, J. 2009. Designing for Older Adults: Principles and Creative Human Factors Approaches2nd Ed. CRC Press.

Institituto Nacional de Estadísticas Chile. 2018. Síntesis resultados Censo 2017. Santiago: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas Junio / 2018.

Leung, R., Tang, Ch., Haddad, Sh., McGrenere, J., Graf, P., and V. Ingriany. 2012. How Older Adults Learn to Use Mobile Devices: Survey and Field Investigations.ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, Vol. 4, No. 3, Article 11.

Mensaje de S.E. el Presidente de la República con el que se inicia un proyecto de ley sobre trasnformación digital del sector público (2018, June 25). Retrieved from https://digital.gob.cl/doc/Proyecto-de-Ley-Transformacion-Digital.pdf

Walking by. Photo by Alfonso Otaegui

Within the frame of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing research project, I have been teaching workshops on smartphone usage for older people at a cultural center for almost a year. Teaching has not only been a very rewarding task, but it has also been a learning experience for me, as I had never taught elderly students before. I have been doing participant observation on how the students interact with their phones not only for the sake of the research project but also to become a better teacher. This opportunity of being in close contact with them for several months, on a weekly basis, when they interact with their phones, has allowed me to spot the main difficulties they face when learning to use this nowadays ubiquitous device.

The enthusiasm and effort of the students are admirable. I had argued a while ago that the experiences of using the phone are as diverse as the people who use it. Some common points can be found however when it comes to the obstacles along the learning curve, which I was able to spot after several months of teaching. One of the main obstacles is, as expected, the stigma of old age, as if ‘technology’ –a word that seems to encompass the totality of this brave new world– were beyond their capabilities: ‘All this is natural for you, the young people, but not for us’ said one student. Soon enough, when the students learn to perform some simple tasks with the phone, their self-confidence grows and allows them to keep learning, even if the stigma is still there, in the back of their minds.

The stigma of old age is not, however, the main obstacle I have encountered when teaching. The most difficult one is, by far, what I name, for lack of a better term, ‘anxiety’. ‘Anxiety’ is a general term to cover several behaviors I observed while they were instructed to do simple procedures. They have in common the underlying feeling of ‘overwhelment’: information or time is handled in a way that the user experience becomes overwhelming and therefore, frustrating.

The clearest example of ‘anxiety’ is getting distracted by too many options, and then blocked to finish the instructed operation. Something that might seem as straightforward as sharing a picture from the Gallery app, has many distracting alternatives along the way if you pay attention to every detail of every screen (most of the students have Android devices). Having opened the app, selected the album and selected the picture, then a series of –too many– possibilities appear, such as a heart, three dots in vertical, three circles intersecting, a square with an arrow, a square with a smiling face and an arrow, a paint pallet, three dots forming a V (the share button), or a trash bin. Even if the students are asked to focus on the share button, some of them may have already tapped on the trash button to delete the image, some others try one or button or another, while most of them ask about what every single button does and do not continue with the task they were learning. Most of the questions they asked me in individual consultations on operations they want to perform could be paraphrased like this: ‘then, I got here, and I don’t know which of all these is the next step’.

So, what can be done from the teacher’s perspective to help them overcome this obstacle? To put it simply, the best solution I have found so far is to deconstruct the garden of forking paths of mobile UI into a single highway. According to a survey and field studies by Leung et al. (2012), old adults prefer manuals for learning how to use mobile devices, as they usually contain step-by-step instructions. That is, in fact, what I ended up doing after a couple of months. With every operation I teach, I organize the web of options into a single line, and then write it down on the whiteboard (we have no screens or projectors at the cultural center), broken down into manageable steps, one after the other. The students copy every step –I usually tweak the instructions for each student, according to the specific UI of their phone–, building their own personal manual. This handwritten reference constitutes fundamental support for the old adult and in a way, it becomes the Ariadne’s thread they need to navigate through the labyrinth of everchanging contextual menus. Ironically, the student needs to ignore options in order to advance. Sometimes, the less you know, the more you learn.

References

Leung, R., Tang, C., Haddad, S., McGrenere, J., Graf, P., and Ingriany, V. 2012. How older adults learn to use mobile devices: Survey and field investigations. ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 4, 3, Article 11 (December 2012), 33 pages. DOI = 10.1145/2399193.2399195 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2399193.2399195