ABSTRACT
This chapter describes research that investigated how age differences and knowledge differences affect the use of everyday technologies, which technologies used for ordinary tasks among people in their typical surroundings. The definition of intuitive interaction used in this research was "interactions between humans and high technology in lenient learning environments that allow the human to use a combination of prior experience and feed forward methods to achieve their functional and abstract goals". The older people represented an equal number of individuals with technology experience in the top third and bottom third of their cohort, as determined by a survey of over 600 older and younger people in the southeastern United State. Younger people were more likely to report that the technology design conformed to their prior knowledge, but problems typically arose for three reasons: interference from another specific technology, expectations of different guidance or feedback, expectations of more time familiarizing themselves with a new version of the technology.
