Age-Related Differences in Performance with Touchscreens Compared to Traditional Mouse Input

Despite the apparent popularity of touch screen for older adults, little is known about the psychomotor performance of these devices. We compare performance between older adults and younger adults in four desktop and touchscreen tasks: pointing, dragging, crossing and steering. On the touchscreen, we also examine pinch zoom. Our results show that while older adults were significantly slower than younger adults in general, the touchscreen reduced the performance gap relative to the desktop and mouse. Indeed, the touchscreen resulted in a significant movement time reduction of 35% over the mouse for older adults, compared to only 16% for younger adults. Error rates also decreased.