What Older Adults Can Teach Us About Designing Better Ballots

FEATURE AT A GLANCE: In this article, we examine the interplay between electronic voting technology machine types (touchscreen vs. touchscreen + keypad) and ballot designs (full ballot vs. one office per page) that together comprise the interface to which voters are exposed. Using a gerontological approach, we show that determining the most usable system for voters with the most limited capabilities (in this study, older participants) also corresponded to higher performance across groups (younger participants). Because older adults are more sensitive to slight differences in human-computer interaction designs, examining their performance may help shed light on potential problems that could otherwise go undetected.

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Adopting Diffractive Reading to Advance HCI Research: A Case Study on Technology for Aging

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction ◽

10.1145/3462326 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 28 (5) ◽

pp. 1-29

Author(s):

Amanda Lazar ◽

Ben Jelen ◽

Alisha Pradhan ◽

Katie A. Siek

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Human Computer Interaction ◽

Aging In Place ◽

Design Workshop ◽

Research Agendas ◽

Conflicting Discourses ◽

Computer Interaction ◽

Critical Reflections

Researchers in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) have long developed technologies for older adults. Recently, researchers are engaging in critical reflections of these approaches. IoT for aging in place is one area around which these conflicting discourses have converged, likely in part driven by government and industry interest. This article introduces diffractive analysis as an approach that examines difference to yield new empirical understandings about our methods and the topics we study. We constructed three analyses of a dataset collected at an IoT design workshop and then conducted a diffractive analysis. We present themes from this analysis regarding the ways that participants are inscribed in our research, considerations related to transferability and novelty between work centered on older adults and other work, and insights about methodologies. Our discussion contributes implications for researchers to form teams and account for their roles in research, as well as recommendations how diffractive analysis can support other research agendas.

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"The Magic of Science:" Beyond Action, a Case Study on Learning Through Socioenaction

10.5753/cbie.wie.2019.501 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Emanuel Felipe Duarte ◽

Vanessa Maike ◽

Yusseli Lizeth Méndez Mendoza ◽

Camilla Brennand ◽

M. Cecília Baranauskas

Keyword(s):

Human Computer Interaction ◽

Children And Adolescents ◽

Digital Technology ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

Recent Advances ◽

The Subject ◽

Shed Light ◽

Alternative Theories ◽

Computer Interaction

Recent advances in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) can significantly affect technology-enhanced educational contexts. Our evolving relationship technology is a challenging topic of investigation, but alternative theories to cognition and socially aware empirical studies can shed light on the subject. In this paper, we explore "The Magic of Science" workshop, conducted in an educational museum context. With a background on learning through action and enactivism, our objective is to observe how people can individually and socially experience pervasive digital technology in educational contexts. Our study included 15 participant children and adolescents, who explored an exhibit of three interactive artworks and then built an interactive artifact from scratch during the workshop. We observed how these interactions took place and collected feedback on the experience of the workshop. Our results indicate that new ways of interacting with pervasive technologies allow us to expand the concept of learning through action, towards learning through socioenaction.

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