While users of all ages fall victim to misinformation sharing on social media, older adults (OAs) may be particularly vulnerable. Yet, current misinformation interventions have rarely incorporated their needs. With the growing adoption of social media among OAs, it is essential to understand their perspectives on credibility assessment and its perceived impact on sharing decisions. Leveraging friends and family (FnF) to support credibility assessment is a promising approach; however, little is known about how OAs value it relative to assessing credibility individually. To probe this question, we created a prototype with different design variants that nudge users before sharing potential misinformation. We conducted comparative structured observations of 12 OAs engaging with the design variants over selected social media posts, examining their perspectives on individual and FnF-based community assessment. Our thematic analysis reveals that OAs prefer an independent approach while assessing credibility because of its flexibility and autonomy, but involving FnF is often desired for the social opportunities it offers, such as shared decision-making and enhancing interpersonal relationships. OAs perceive multifaceted risks when sharing across inner (FnF) and outer circles and exhibit varying trust in the perceived expertise of individually explored information sources, compared to that of FnF. Drawing on a nuanced understanding of social and relational factors that shape OAs' outlook toward engaging FnF in fact-checking, we highlight the design challenges and opportunities for empowering OAs to mitigate the social risks in seeking assessment support from their closest communities.

Semi-structured interviews are a critical qualitative method in many areas, including CSCW and HCI, enabling researchers to uncover deep contextualized insights. Using this flexible method, interviewers must adapt to interviewees' responses while adhering to the protocol, necessitating strong active listening and real-time analytical skills. While recent studies have explored how AI can support researchers in qualitative analysis, to our knowledge, no research has investigated AI's role in supporting semi-structured interviews while they are underway. Taking one step toward filling this gap, we interviewed 16 researchers with a range of prior interviewing expertise. Our inductive thematic analysis reveals that interviewers expect real-time AI assistance to support research objectives and facilitate interpersonal communication, but also have concerns about its impact on long-term skill development. We discuss how semi-structured interviews differ from other problem-solving or creative human-AI collaboration contexts, highlighting the time constraints, multimodal collaboration, and the triangular dynamic among interviewers, interviewees, and AI. We also delve into how interviewers' levels of expertise affect their envisioned interviewer-AI collaboration. We then propose design challenges for future CSCW work on AI-driven assistants in interview contexts.

Technology-mediated communication tools are widely used to maintain connections between older adults and their remote family members. However, challenges often arise due to differences in their life rhythms and communication preferences, such as time zones, daily routines, or preferred platforms. To address these challenges, we propose using Ditto, a mimetic embodied agent, in video-call-like interactions between an older adult and a remote family member. When direct interaction is difficult, FamilyDitto can represent either party, providing a strong social presence and a personalized experience to the other person. To explore the potential of Ditto in supporting intergenerational communication, we conducted seven co-design workshops (n=27) with older adults and younger family members. Our thematic analysis reveals Ditto's potential roles as both a temporal bridge and an emotional proxy, identifies the tension between faithful and idealized representations, and emphasizes the importance of personalization to support unique family dynamics. We distill our findings into implications for designing mediated semi-synchronous communication, using idealized representation responsibly, and addressing the asymmetric motivations and comfort levels with Ditto across roles and ages. This study provides a foundation for mimetic AI technologies that enhance, rather than replace, human connection in remote intergenerational relationships.

Financial technology (fintech) has a growing impact on economic and social participation due to the increasing adoption of online banking and digital payments in everyday life. As fintech interests emerge in academic and industry work across the globe, critical needs and opportunities arise for ASSETS communities to lead and shape the discourse on accessible fintech. This workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in developing a research agenda on designing accessible and inclusive fintech. We will take a timely step towards building a community to support continued discussion on the complex cultural and social contexts around fintech.

Older adults commonly rely on younger family members for remote tech support, but the current general-purpose video-conferencing platforms fall short of effectively catering to their needs. We introduce the design concept and prototypes for HelpCall, an augmentation of these platforms that provides aids for learning computer tasks, including a step-by-step visual guide automatically generated from synchronous human instruction. Through observations and interviews with older adults (N=14), we assessed the potential of the HelpCall concept and compared its two design candidates: Tooltip with numbered location markers and List of written steps. All participants acknowledged HelpCall’s potential to improve the comfort and efficiency of synchronous tech support. Tooltip emerged as more promising and could be enhanced by incorporating the well-received features from List. Our findings provide clear directions for advancing HelpCall design and new insights into designing synchronous software help for older adults, taking a step towards universal accessibility of digital technology.

Participants of one-to-many videoconferencing calls often experience a significant loss of affective feedback due to the limitations of the medium. To address this problem, we present Co-Here: a videoconferencing module that renders participant-driven animations that convey group affect without relying on categorical emotion detection or signaling. Co-Here consolidates and visualizes facial expressions and head movements of fellow videoconferencers, providing a sufficient medium for others to meaningfully construct emotional impressions. Our qualitative user study showed that the system helped users feel a sense of alignment with the emotions of others using the system. Co-Here had the most utility to presentation viewers, who reported that the system offered a low-attention alternative to gauging the sentiment of the crowd.

Traditional symbol-based AAC devices impose meta-linguistic and memory demands on individuals with complex communication needs and hinder conversation partners from stimulating symbolic language in meaningful moments. This work presents a prototype application that generates situation-specific communication boards formed by a combination of descriptive, narrative, and semantic related words and phrases inferred automatically from photographs. Through semi-structured interviews with AAC professionals, we investigate how this prototype was used to support communication and language learning in naturalistic school and therapy settings. We find that the immediacy of vocabulary reduces conversation partners’ workload, opens up opportunities for AAC stimulation, and facilitates symbolic understanding and sentence construction. We contribute a nuanced understanding of how vocabularies generated automatically from photographs can support individuals with complex communication needs in using and learning symbolic AAC, offering insights into the design of automatic vocabulary generation methods and interfaces to better support various scenarios of use and goals.

AAC research has traditionally focused on input speed, leaving higher-level communication goals such as relational maintenance under-explored. Through semi-structured interviews with AAC users with motor and speech impairments and their primary family caregivers, we offer a nuanced understanding of AAC’s roles in maintaining close relationships. Our inductive analysis reveals emerging themes including how AAC users and their partners share the physical and mental workload to overcome communication barriers in complex situations. Our deductive application of the Relational Maintenance Strategies framework exposes the efforts made and the challenges encountered in managing social engagements, providing mutual support, and decoding implicit expressions. From these insights, we propose novel research directions for better supporting maintenance strategies and social purposes of communication, including notably mediating relational tensions, leveraging empowerment and identity, and supporting interactions for social closeness and etiquette, which we hope will motivate discussion in HCI communities on expanding AAC research space.

Best practices for conducting HCI research on dementia care increasingly involve multiple stakeholders and incorporate diverse viewpoints. When done effectively, involving proxy stakeholders such as family members and professionals can help bring forward the voices of people with dementia. However, concrete practical guidance for navigating the challenges of integrating different perspectives is lacking. We critically reflect on our own recent qualitative fieldwork involving participants with dementia, family caregivers, and facilitators at a local social program for people with dementia, re-examining our interview transcripts and observation notes through content analysis. We illustrate practical approaches to prioritizing participants’ voices through concrete excerpts that demonstrate strategies for better managing dynamics, intervening effectively, and engaging all stakeholders in the research process. Our reflections and proposed guidelines can benefit HCI researchers and practitioners working with vulnerable populations. We hope this work will spur further discussion and critique to strengthen and improve research practices in this domain.

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.

People with dementia face major challenges in maintaining active social interaction. Designing digital tools for social sharing within families and care facilities has been well explored by HCI research, but comparatively less work has considered community settings. Situated in a community-based program for storytelling and socializing, our field observations and semi-structured interviews with people living with early-middle stage dementia, family caregivers, and program facilitators illustrate both positive and challenging aspects of social activities. We contribute a nuanced understanding of participants' social lives and identify four factors that aid in achieving positive outcomes: effective agencies for social interaction, normalized and friendly environments, collaboration and teamwork, and mediating social cues and communication. Finally, we examine our findings through the lens of past HCI work and offer insights for designing new social technologies to diversify the range of social spaces in community settings, through expanding peer collaboration, leveraging physical and virtual spaces, creating open-ended experiences, and developing flexible platforms.