Design and Development of a Digital Literacy Tool for Senior Australian Citizens

Senior citizens find it difficult to keep up with today’s fast-paced technological changes which results in low digital literacy and subsequent social exclusion. Existing online training programs such as Be Connected hosted by the Australian Government fail to provide engaging training resources that encourage seniors to improve their skills.

This project is a collaboration with the ShapingConnections consortium, The Monash Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), and the University of the Third Age (U3A). It is aimed at addressing the above shortcoming through the development of an engaging interactive digital literacy training resource that is tailored to the specific needs of senior citizens.

In a first step, we started to explore the opportunities and threats for the envisaged training resource. Four teams of MADA Master of Interaction Design students were tasked to develop design prototypes for the concrete case study of using a pharmacy online shop including online prescriptions. The student teams followed a Human-Centred Design (HCD) approach, including regular consultations with representatives from the U3A to incorporate early input from Australian seniors.

The final feedback from participating seniors was encouraging while we also identified security and privacy risks. The seniors especially liked the incorporation of avatars and quizzes. On the other hand, we noticed that seniors may object to entering (mocked up) personal information into an online resource because they are worried about identity theft and other privacy risks. Secondly, there is the risk that senior users accidentally enter real-world credentials. Consequently, we decided to develop an offline training resource that can safely be used in the teaching facilities of the U3A.

The next steps include the review and refinement of the design prototypes with a wider U3A audience, followed by the creation and evaluation of a software prototype under real-world conditions. The latter will enable us to study selected human-centric aspects in detail. We plan to secure a research grant for our next steps. Reporting on project outcomes will be in the form of scientific papers.

Project Lead

Dr Ingo Mueller

Project Team

Jeffrey Janet (MADA), Bernardo Figueiredo and Torgeir Aleti (ShapingConnections / RMIT), U3A