Robin Brewer

Why would anybody do this?: Understanding Older Adults' Motivations and Challenges in Crowd Work

Diversifying participation in crowd work can benefit the worker and requester. Increasing numbers of older adults are online, but little is known about their awareness of or how they engage in mainstream crowd work. Through an online survey with 505 seniors, we found that most have never heard of crowd work but would be motivated to complete tasks by earning money or working on interesting or stimulating tasks. We follow up results from the survey with interviews and observations of 14 older adults completing crowd work tasks. While our survey data suggests that financial incentives are encouraging, in-depth interviews reveal that a combination of personal and social incentives may be stronger drivers of participation, but only if older adults can overcome accessibility issues and understand the purpose of crowd work. This paper contributes insights into how crowdsourcing sites could better engage seniors and other users.

Vulnerability, Sharing, and Privacy: Analyzing Art Therapy for Older Adults with Dementia

Older adults are most often considered consumers of online information, but recent work highlights the importance of engaging older adults in content generation and online sharing. One context in which older adults generate and share content is art therapy for individuals with dementia. Our analysis draws on Altmans notion of privacy and territorial regions to understand what sharing means for this vulnerable population. This theoretical framing reveals the ways in which privacy is cooperatively negotiated, which is in contrast to the individualistic view of existing sharing systems; how older adults derive benefits from sharing depending on interaction with their audience; and how sharing fluctuates between a focus on the process of therapy versus the product depending on privacy needs. Our analysis contributes an understanding of the complex nature of sharing for vulnerable populations and offers design considerations for systems that support this practice.

Going Gray, Failure to Hire, and the Ick Factor: Analyzing How Older Bloggers Talk about Ageism

Ageism is a pervasive, and often invisible, form of discrimination. Though it can affect people of all ages, older adults in particular face age-related stereotypes and bias in their everyday lives. In this paper, we describe the ways in which older bloggers articulate a collective narrative on ageism as it appears in their lives, develop a community with anti-ageist interests, and discuss strategies to navigate and change societal views and institutions. Bloggers criticize stereotypical notions that focus exclusively on losses that occur with age and advocate a view that takes into account the complexity and positive aspects of older adulthood. This paper contributes a unique case of online collective action among older adults while drawing on their online discourse as a way of understanding what ageism means for CSCW.

Exploring Traditional Phones as an E-Mail Interface for Older Adults

This article explores the design and development of voice interfaces via traditional telephones as a way of supporting asynchronous online communication for older adults. E-mail is the primary form of online communication for older adults. However, e-mail communication currently requires access to and the ability to use an Internet-connected computer or device, which may be problematic due to barriers of physical access, expense, insufficient computer skill, or other accessibility issues. To address this, the present work leverages the pervasive hardware of traditional phones and familiar nonvisual models of phone-based interaction to create a new e-mail interface for older adults. We examine the potential of e-mail interaction via traditional phones through long-term field observations, prototype testing, and a four-week field-based user study. Our findings indicate that a simple voice e-mail interface accessed through traditional phones is usable for older adults and is a useful way for offline older adults to interact with an e-mail account. The ease of use and convenience of a phone-based interface are important given the “work” of keeping in touch over e-mail, and this approach has the potential to open up new avenues of online access for older adults who are still offline or who have late-life disabilities that make using traditional graphical e-mail systems difficult. This project contributes new insights regarding the ways in which voice interfaces can support asynchronous online communication for older adults and provides design guidance for the development of subsequent voice interfaces.

Subcontracting Microwork

Mainstream crowdwork platforms treat microtasks as indivisible units; however, in this article, we propose that there is value in re-examining this assumption. We argue that crowdwork platforms can improve their value proposition for all stakeholders by supporting subcontracting within microtasks. After describing the value proposition of subcontracting, we then define three models for microtask subcontracting: real-time assistance, task management, and task improvement, and reflect on potential use cases and implementation considerations associated with each. Finally, we describe the outcome of two tasks on Mechanical Turk meant to simulate aspects of subcontracting. We reflect on the implications of these findings for the design of future crowd work platforms that effectively harness the potential of subcontracting workflows.

Technology learning and use among older adults with late-life vision impairments

Increasing numbers of older adults are now using computers and going online. Yet, certain disabilities that are acquired later in life, such as severe vision impairments, make it difficult to use modern information and communication technologies (ICTs). Currently, we have a limited understanding of how older adults with late-life vision impairments adopt, learn, and use ICTs to communicate and seek information. To address this gap in the literature, this paper presents results from in-depth interviews with 15 older adults (age 60–99), who are low vision or blind, to understand how they use technologies to stay connected and engage online. While the older adults in this study have physical access to computers and many are motivated to explore new technologies to stay in touch, a number of barriers exist to using modern communication devices and online tools (e.g., e-mail, search, social media). Vision impairment in older adulthood presents complex challenges due to one’s changing visual abilities coupled with an evolving landscape of accessible communication technologies. Additionally, the benefits of using modern devices are juxtaposed with generational values of what is meaningful communication and the familiarity and inherent accessibility of phone communication. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for the design of accessible ICT for older adults with vision impairments.

How to Remember What to Remember: Exploring Possibilities for Digital Reminder Systems

Digital reminder systems typically use time and place as triggers to remind people to perform activities. In this paper, we investigate how digital reminder systems could better support the process of remembering in a wider range of situations. We report findings from a survey and one-week diary study, which reveal that people want to remember to perform a broad spectrum of activities in the future, many of which cannot be supported by simple time- and location-based reminders. In addition to these examples of prospective memory, or ‘remembering intentions’ [53], we also find that people want support in ‘retrieving’ [53] information and details, especially those encountered through social interactions or intended for use in conversations with others. Drawing on our analysis of what people want to remember and how they try to support this, we draw implications for the design of intelligent reminder systems such as digital assistants (e.g. Microsoft’s Cortana) and smart speaker systems (e.g. Amazon Echo), and highlight the possibilities afforded by drawing on conversation and giving material form to digital reminders.

xPress: Rethinking Design for Aging and Accessibility through an IVR Blogging System

Although many older adults are active online, certain age-related disabilities, such as late-life vision impairment, make sustaining online participation difficult. Motivated by the need for accessible online spaces for people experiencing vision impairment in older adulthood, we developed xPress, a voice-based online blogging community. Through a 10-week deployment with seven older adults with acquired vision loss, we analyze how this type of online community enables connecting with peers, sharing experiences, and offering social support in new ways. The design of xPress also highlights the importance of human voice in accessible social platforms and reveals expectations around community participation. We discuss designing for age and disability through the lens of intersectionality and offer design considerations for similar voice-based online communities.

An Approach to Audio-Only Editing for Visually Impaired Seniors

Older adults and people with vision impairments are increasingly using phones to receive audio-based information and want to publish content online but must use complex audio recording/editing tools that often rely on inaccessible graphical interfaces. This poster describes the design of an accessible audio-based interface for post-processing audio content created by visually impaired seniors. We conducted a diary study with five older adults with vision impairments to understand how to design a system that would allow them to edit content they record using an audio-only interface. Our findings can help inform the development of accessible audio-editing interfaces for people with vision impairments more broadly.

Connecting Older Adults through Voice-Based Interfaces

My dissertation work focuses on increasing access to online communication and enabling self-expression for older adults with vision impairments. This population experiences barriers including technology cost and learnability of accessible software required for going online. My dissertation draws on research in accessibility, social computing, and aging along with my background in computer science, human-computer interaction, and communication studies. I will design, build, and evaluate a voice-based online platform that allows older adults to share content and express themselves through a traditional phone interface. I will study how sharing through this platform impacts social support, isolation, and quality of life as people age with vision impairments.