Older adults and hackathons: a qualitative study

Abstract

Globally observed trends in aging indicate that older adults constitute a growing share of the population and an increasing demographic in the modern technologies marketplace. Therefore, it has become important to address the issue of participation of older adults in the process of developing solutions suitable for their group. In this study, we approached this topic by organizing a hackathon involving teams of young programmers and older adults participants. Below we describe a case study of that hackathon, in which our objective was to motivate older adults to participate in software engineering processes. Based on our results from an array of qualitative methods, we propose a set of good practices that may lead to improved older adult participation in similar events and an improved process of developing apps that target older adults.

A Comparative Study of Younger and Older Adults’ Interaction with a Crowdsourcing Android TV App for Detecting Errors in TEDx Video Subtitles

“…This may be because older adults are less likely to criticize design choices in the context of technology, as they feel they lack experience in it so they are not confident enough to know they can contribute. This was also observed in the context of participatory design by Kopec et al [8]. Also, even though some older adults had to sit closer to the screen to read (O1, O3) it was a younger adult (Y6) who voiced that they would like the interface to be bigger.…”

Older Adults and Voice Interaction

“…Multiple studies on HCI and aging, instead of exploring the aging process and opportunities, focus on health, socialization and technology stereotypes [13]. Positive studies, are still rare, and one shared feature is that they use older adults' strengths, such as their insights from life experience [5] or language proficiency [11] which increase with age. Moreover, older adults realize the benefits that come with an increased ICT proficiency [1] especially if it helps them achieve personal goals [4], such as communicating with their loved ones, managing finance, engaging in e-commerce or pursuing their interests [2,8,14].…”

Guidelines towards better participation of older adults in software development processes using a new SPIRAL method and participatory approach

“…Challenge Elaboration technology barrier and lack of ICT skills low ICT literacy and familiarity with technology, lack of knowledge of existing solutions and understanding of basic ICT concepts [24,28,32] lack of selfconfidence and limited social involvement low self-confidence connected to the feeling of alienation from the increasingly technology-dependent society [21,28] stereotypes among young startup teams age-related stereotypes concerning the activities, interests and mental capacities of older adults [9,22] improper level of criticism among older adults bias for and eagerness to accept the solutions of others with low criticism [15,34] These challenges point to the need to involve the users in even more steps of the development process, including the earliest ones and those usually reserved for industry professionals and to include them to a greater extent, as only this will address all of the problems uncovered in related research and counter the limitations of existing solutions.…”

“…Based on our LivingLab experience and research [21,22,24,31,32,34] agile prototyping and participatory design concepts, we propose a 4-step model named SPIRAL (Support for Participant Involvement in Rapid and Agile software development Labs) which consists of:…”

“…Brief overview of the hackathon for over a hundred participants is available online 2 . The method and research were thoroughly described in Empirical Software Engineering [22] and were also a subject of corresponding ICSE journal-first session. [23] Participants empowerment: We have successfully conducted a series of user empowering workshops on the full cycle of designing mobile applications interfaces, including both paper ( Fig.…”