Community Meeting Notes (Oct 18, 2017) - The Development and Evaluation of a Crowdsourced Mobile Application for Rating the Age-Friendliness of Communities

Owned by Justin Obara
Last updated: Nov 06, 2017
2 min read

Description

Presenters: Eryn Weldon and Jacob Leung

Slides

Q/A:

  1. Any specific criteria for attitudes towards older adults?
    1. It's left up to the interpretation of the user
  2. How do you account for differences in attitudes from different people on different occasions?
    1. Hope that with enough users that it will account for the variability.
  3. Does the system indicate the number of ratings applied to a location?
    1. No it doesn't show that, but they know on the back end. You can also see the number of comments left.
    2. The app also asks if the rater is an older adult or family member
  4. Does the app allow a rater to indicate the time of day?
    1. Not yet, but others have asked about similar things for editing ratings
    2. Others don't want to have a lot of overhead to add a rating (e.g. login, etc).
      1. could perhaps allow sign up through Google or other service
      2. could allow for simple ratings without logging in and then do more after logging in
      3. could use features of the browser (e.g. cookies) to track a user across sessions (could be an issue if it is a shared device/machine).
  5. Where all questions give equal rating for the summary rating?
    1. For close by, people looked only at the summary scores
    2. For planning for further trips, they looked through the details
    3. If something had a really low score, like 1, they did look at the breakdown more to see if something was high and something else was dragging the score down.
  6. It would be helpful if you could curate a list (star, favourite) places that you'd want to go to.
  7. Look at where you can do integration with other services.
    1. Google Maps
    2. WheelMaps Accessibility.Cloud
  8. Are you considering using sensors from the phone to determine light, noise level and etc?
    1. haven't yet, but it sounds like a good idea
  9. Consider rethinking language, so that it doesn't constantly reinforce the notion that the user is an older adult.
    1. Seniors may not be concerned with that.
      1. Some prefer some terms over others.
    2. A lot of the features and aspects that are being rated may be of use to others who aren't necessarily older adults.
  10. What about rating healthcare complexes and doctors offices?
  11. Did anybody during the usability tests use any assistive technologies?
    1. None that they were aware of
    2. The criteria for participation was above 65, english speaking, with a mobile device.
    3. In the focus groups there were different needs – vision, hearing, mobility
  12. Can you create your own customized rating system from a pool of data?
    1. yes, similar to data transformation used in GPII (Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure)
    2. Could you even just specify how you sort, weight aspects of the weighting?
      1. useful for the summary rating
      2. for ratings like (is there an elevator) the user may not be as concerned with their being an elevator but with the level of access to all of the features/services/etc at the location.
  13. Have you thought about ways to make your app more adaptable?
    1.  Currently the app can increase/decrease font size.