Technology adoption among older adults has increased significantly in recent years. Yet, as new technologies proliferate and the demographics of aging shift, continued attention to older adults’ adoption priorities and learning preferences is required. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine the factors adults 65+ prioritize in choosing new technologies, the challenges they encounter in learning to use them, and the human and material resources they employ to support these efforts. Using a video prototype as a design probe, we present scenarios to explore older adults’ perceptions of adoption and learning new technologies within the lens of health management support, a relevant and beneficial context for older adults. Our results reveal that participants appreciated self-paced learning, remote support, and flexible learning methods, and were less reliant on instruction manuals than in the past. This work provides insight into older adults’ evolving challenges, learning needs, and design opportunities for next generation learning support.

Many digital technologies, such as social media, community systems, and public displays, have been studied to explore how people engage with each other in their community. Yet little is known about how one form of technology, location-based games (LBGs), can support urban residents in community awareness, city exploration, and placemaking as they navigate spaces and places in their cities. To explore this topic, we investigated the challenges urban residents faced in finding information about their community along a transit network. We then designed, developed, and evaluated an LBG called City Explorer that supports city exploration using gamification and the viewing and sharing of community information. We found that residents valued the fun, competition, and rewards afforded through play in public spaces, creating opportunities for placemaking through location services and knowledge sharing. Players also wanted additional knowledge about their transit commutes, including data about the frequency and routines of their transit rides. Collectively, such ridership data offers potential for smart city initiatives and illustrates that careful design considerations are required to balance people’s needs for play, personal data, privacy, and community information acquisition.

Video communication systems work relatively well for family members and friends when they want to converse with each other between their homes. Yet it is much more challenging to share activities using mobile video conferencing in outdoor settings. We explored the design of mobile video conferencing systems that focused on allowing family and friends to participate in outdoor leisure activities together over distance. We created and studied two technology probe setups: shared geocaching and shared bicycling. Both used mobile cameras and streamed audio and video between remote family members or friends as they participated in the activities. Through these design and study explorations, we explore how family and friends make use of mobile video during leisure activities, what elements are important for the design of such systems, and how mobile video for outdoor leisure activities compares and contrasts to video calling in the home and, more generally, while mobile. Our research points to design considerations around camera views, when and how audio and video should be presented, and the privacy concerns of users and how to balance them with the benefit of the technology.

Information communication technologies for development (ICTD) can support people with chronic illnesses living in rural communities. In Kenya, ICTD use in areas where undetected cases of hypertension and high HIV infection rates exist is underexplored. Partnering with a health facility in Migori, Kenya, we report on the uses of technology in managing HIV. We see the use of technology to manage HIV was influenced by the roles and routines of patients and clinicians, trust between practitioners and patients, and sources of data that clinicians use for patient examination. We use these results to inform the design of technologies that can support patients living with comorbid HIV and hypertension, as well as their care providers, to manage their care in similar settings. We also reiterate the important mediatory role that community health volunteers (CHVs) can play in the adoption of technology as patients manage their condition(s) once out of hospital.

A rapid proliferation of specialized consumer tech gadgets (e.g., Fitbits) demands attention to the challenges that individuals face in learning to use them. Help Kiosk (HK) was initially conceived to support older adults in independently learning to use a smartphone, but it was only ever examined for this one context. Its design also required users to divide their attention between different areas of an augmented display and their smartphone. We introduce HK 2.0, which leverages a 40" tabletop display to integrate support into one visual space, while also supporting older adults in learning how to use multiple smart devices that must be configured to work together (e.g., a smartwatch synched to a tablet). Our new system also builds on the self-directed learning environment of the initial HK by introducing a collaborative learning feature to provide remote support by family and friends. We share the design of HK 2.0, including design requirements, features, and learning topics.

Many working professionals commute via public transit, yet they have limited tools for learning about their urban neighborhoods and fellow commuters. We designed a location-based game called City Explorer to investigate how transit commuters capture, share, and view community information that is specifically tied to locations. Through a four-week field study, we found that participants valued the increased awareness of their personal travel routines that they gained through City Explorer. When viewing community information, they preferred information that was factual rather than opinion-based and was presented at the start and end of their commutes. Participants found less value in connecting with other transit riders because transit rides were often seen as opportunities to disengage from others. We discuss how location-based technologies can be designed to display factual community information before, during, and at the end of transit commutes.

Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to one in which aspects of everyday life are shared over long periods of time, sometimes in an almost passive manner. We describe and reflect on studies of long-distance couples, teenagers, and major life events, along with design research focused on new video communication systems—the Family Window, Family Portals, and Perch—that explicitly support “always-on video” for awareness and communication. Overall, our findings show that people highly value long-term video connections and have appropriated them in a number of different ways. Designers of future video communication systems need to consider: ways of supporting the sharing of everyday life rather than just conversation, providing different design solutions for different locations and situations, providing appropriate audio control and feedback, and supporting expressions of intimacy over distance.

Much ICTD research for sub-Saharan Africa has focused on how technology related interventions have aimed to incorporate marginalized communities towards global economic growth. Our work builds on this. We present results from an exploratory qualitative study on the family communication practices of family members who communicate both within and between rural, suburban, and urban settings in Kenya. Our findings reveal that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, life advice, and everyday coordination of activities. We also outline social factors that affect family communication, including being an eldest child, having a widowed sibling, and having reduced access to technology because of gender, literacy, or one's financial situation. Lastly, we discuss new opportunities for technology design and articulate the challenges that designers will face if creating or deploying family communication technologies in Kenya.

Our research explores the use of mobile video chat in public spaces by people participating in parallel experiences, where both a local and remote person are doing the same activity together at the same time. We prototyped a wearable video chat experience and had pairs of friends and family members participate in 'shared geocaching' over distance. Our results show that video streaming works best for navigation tasks but is more challenging to use for fine-grained searching tasks. Video streaming also creates a very intimate experience with a remote partner, but this can lead to distraction from the 'real world' and even safety concerns. Overall, privacy concerns with streaming from a public space were not typically an issue; however, people tended to rely on assumptions of what were acceptable. The implications are that designers should consider appropriate feedback, user disembodiment, and asymmetry when designing for parallel experiences.

Mobile payment services have recently emerged in North America where users pay for items using their smartphones. Yet we have little understanding of how people are making use of them and what successes and challenges they have experienced. As a result, we conducted a diary and interview study of user behaviors, motivations, and first impressions of mobile payment services in North America in order to understand how to best design for mobile payment experiences. Participants used a variety of services, including Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, LevelUp, Square and company apps geared towards payments (e.g., Starbucks). Our findings show that users experience challenges related to mental model development, pre-purchase anxiety and trust issues, despite enjoying the gamification, ease-of-use, and support for routine purchases with mobile payments. This suggests designing a better mobile payment experience through the incorporation of users' routines and behaviors, gamification and trust mechanism development.

Group shopping sites are beginning to rise in popularity amongst eCommerce users. Yet we do not know how or why people are using such sites, and whether or not the design of group shopping sites map to the real shopping needs of end users. To address this, we describe an interview study that investigates the friendship networks of people who participate in group shopping sites (e.g., Groupon) with the goal of understanding how to best design for these experiences. Our results show that group shopping sites are predominently used to support social activities; that is, users do not use them first and foremost to find 'deals'. Instead, group shopping sites are used for planning group activities, extending and building friendships, and constructing one's social identity. Based on these findings, we suggest improved social network integration and impression management tools to improve user experience within group shopping sites.

When a patient has a chronic illness, such as heart disease or cancer, it can be challenging for distributed family members to stay aware of the patient's health status. A variety of technologies are available to support health information sharing (e.g., phone, video chat, social media), yet we still do not have a detailed understanding of which technologies are preferred and what challenges people still face when sharing information with them. To explore this, we conducted a mixed-method study-involving a survey and in-depth interviews--with people about their health information sharing routines and preferences for different technologies. Regardless of physical distance between distributed family members, synchronous methods of communication afforded the opportunity to provide affective support while asynchronous methods of communication were deemed to be the least intrusive. With family members adopting certain roles during the treatment of chronic illnesses, our findings suggest the need to design tools that mediate sharing health information across distance and age gaps, with consideration to respecting patient privacy while sharing health information.