Andrea Rosales, postdoctoral researcher of the Communication Networks and Social Changes research group (CNSC), received the Honorable Mention Award, which is given to recognize the best papers of the conference "MobileHCI '16, International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services", which took place in Florence from the 6th to the 9th September.
Rosales presented the paper "Smartphones, apps and older people's interests: from a generational perspective", in which she argues that as ICT are designed mostly with young users in mind, and that, most studies about smartphone use do not include older people or even consider age differences, little is known about how to design smartphone apps taking older people's interests into account. Through a mixed-method approach with an intergenerational perspective to approach this topic the author has found specific media consumption and communication patterns among older individuals: for example, at home they are more prone to jumping between devices for ergonomic reasons, thus, cross-device interactions are key for this group. In this paper, she discusses on the relevance of intergenerational studies in counterbalancing the spread of age stereotypes and identifying alternative adoption trends.
You can find the abstract and the full paper here.