Bridging the Gap Between Designers and Users: Co-designing Health-Related Voice User Interface Experiences with Older Adults

In this paper, we describe our approach to bridging the designer-user gap by engaging 20 older adults in codesign workshops to generatively re-imagine health-related voice agent (VA) design for voice user interfaces (VUI) for older adults, by older adults. Drawing on recent research in Library and Information Science (LIS), we describe codesign as a method, as well as how the 20 older adults perceived codesign in our two case studies of health-related VA design for health learning and exercise. Older adult codesigners perceived codesign as transformative, enjoyable, educational, and useful. We also share specific experiential recommendations of strategies for conducting codesign, including strategies for transitioning from expert to facilitator, creating experience-based questions, probing for deeper design ideation and priorities, and ways of approaching codesign through humility and care. We describe the codesign method’s generative benefits in our two case studies and encourage LIS researchers to consider including codesign methods in their research.