This week at Fraunhofer AICOS, COLABORAR hosted an Internal Workshop regarding this project.
The goal of the workshop was to let the team know about the current state of things within the network COLABORAR, to exchange ideas on how the network may be even more useful to researchers, and how researchers themselves may contribute to nourish our network.
In order to do this, we shared insights about what the user network means to our volunteers and the beneficial impact that our activities may have on older adults, their daily activities, mental stimulation or self-confidence.
While the user group of older adults is a very heterogeneous one, there are aspects which often come about in user research and usability testing. There are specific issues that we need to take into account, such as planning activities in advance, allowing for significant ones to participate as well, draw an efficient plan to make use of time and breaks, and so forth.
Most of the tips we shared with researchers in this workshop came from insights provided by our researchers from the HCI, who were interviewed some time ago to share their difficulties, experience and strategies. This work has actually resulted in a paper that was published in 2013.
In the end, researchers could clarify some doubts and COLABORAR shared some materials to help researchers plan the activities with senior end-users.