Insights on Older Adults’ Attitudes and Behavior Through the Participatory Design of an Online Storytelling Platform

While digital technology adoption by older adults rises constantly, the design of new technologies often overlooks the culture of the end users, which, in turn, has an impact on the acceptance and use by many of them. Based on the fact that technology adoption by this age group in Greece remains low, compared to the vast majority of the EU countries, our goal in this paper is to gain further insights into the user requirements of older adults as web 2.0 storytellers in order for designers to better address their needs. For this purpose, we implemented participatory design with five older adults in Greece over a twelve-week period, combined with an evolutionary prototyping approach, as we noticed during our sessions that our participants had a difficulty in envisioning and proposing novel technologies. In order to analyze and interpret the feedback that we collected during the design sessions, the digital storytelling sessions and the in-depth interviews, we made use of the Activity Theory, as well as age-related and self-presentation frameworks. Through probing our participants’ usage and design preferences of the storytelling platform, we came up with a set of attributes and motives that seem to expound their online choices. Issues of loneliness and social inclusion, generativity and computer mediated communication, among others, have emerged. Additionally, differences and similarities with findings from other studies have been indicated.