CAREER: Voice Technologies for Helping Older Adults Navigate Uncertain Information in Decision Making

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).People often create strategies for determining if the information they encounter online is credible. For example, they may evaluate the website’s structure, professionalism, or other design features. However, many of these strategies are not helpful when searching for information when using voice technologies, many of which lack screens and thus don’t present visual credibility cues. Further, older adults, who often use voice technologies to address accessibility challenges posed by vision, motor, and cognitive disabilities, are also often more susceptible to contradictory or uncertain information that characterizes important topics such as healthcare. Combined, these factors place older adults at greater risk of making risky decisions when accessing information online. This project investigates approaches for developing voice technologies that help older adults with credibility assessment, managing uncertain or inconsistent information, and making informed decisions. The work will advance knowledge about how older adults use voice technologies in seeking information online, develop models for non-visual information seeking, and create new ways of interacting with voice assistants and information to reduce these risks. This project draws upon behavior change research to investigate how to nudge older adults towards better information decisions when using voice technologies. To do so, the research team will engage older adults as community partners, not only in involved in data collection, but also as members of the research team. The research will (1) provide empirical evidence of older adults’ information behaviors when using voice interfaces; (2) evaluate a range of choice architecture strategies for voice-based information seeking and decision-making, using findings to inform the design of a framework for non-visual information seeking; (3) implement the design framework through a toolkit of novel audio tools; and (4) deploy these tools, evaluating their effectiveness at mitigating information uncertainty “in-the-wild” with older adults. The outcomes of the work will advance research in human computer interaction, information retrieval and sensemaking, and aging. Further, as voice interface design is understudied in computing education, this project will also contribute new modules for teaching voice application design to middle and high school students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.