Privacy-Conscious Design Requirements to Support Older Adults’ Health Information Seeking

Older adults (OAs) are active seekers of health information, and increasingly doing so online. Recent research has revealed OAs’ motivations, approaches, concerns, and social resources that form their health information seeking practices. However, this has mostly looked at OAs as consumers of information. Comparatively less is known about what is needed from possible tools that support OAs’ ability to seek, understand, exchange, and manage health information independently (and privately). We address this gap by first gaining a renewed understanding of OAs’ health information seeking behaviours and challenges. This allows us to suggest requirements for designing usable collaborative tools that help overcome health information seeking barriers, and balance older adults’ practical support needs with respect for their independence, privacy, and social connectedness. These have been developed through contextual inquiries and participatory workshops with 12 OAs. We validated these design requirements through a usability study of a privacy-conscious collaborative multimedia browser extension.