Evaluating Priorities for Age-Friendly Home Modifications Using Importance–Performance Analysis: A Case Study of Xinhai Community, Shanghai

Population ageing has created an urgent need to prioritise home modifications in older urban communities, yet evaluation frameworks that jointly integrate residents’ importance perceptions with current performance remain limited. This study applied Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) to assess priorities for age-friendly home modifications in Xinhai Community, Shanghai, China. A literature-based pool of 20 candidate indicators was contextualised through field observations and screened by nine experts, yielding 17 indicators grouped by primary function into Safety, Independence, Comfort, and Sustainability. The analysis included 361 older residents retained from 419 initially usable questionnaires after excluding 58 (13.84%). Using mean-based crosshairs, at the criterion level, Safety and Independence were located in the high-importance–low-satisfaction priority-improvement quadrant, whereas Comfort occupied the low-importance–high-satisfaction extra-resource quadrant and Sustainability occupied the low-importance–low-satisfaction secondary-improvement quadrant. At the indicator level, 8 of 17 factors were classified as priority-improvement items. Classification was sensitive to threshold choice, particularly for indicators 8, 11, and 14; conservative uncertainty bounds did not establish population-level quadrant membership. The four largest negative satisfaction–importance gaps were observed for Anti-slip Measures (P − I = −1.939), Indoor Pathway Width and Smoothness (−1.931), the Grab-bar and Handrail System (−1.709), and Restroom Accessibility (−1.670). The IPA framework provides a transparent, evidence-based decision aid for identifying preliminary areas for subsequent technical and economic assessment, distinguishing building-embedded structural deficits from device-based support. While the single-community, cross-sectional design limits generalisability, the proposed priority-setting process offers a replicable protocol for comparable communities in rapidly ageing cities.