Evaluating IT based services for older users

This paper summarizes experiences of empirical research done for evaluating information and communication technology (ICT) based services that aim at supporting older users in independent living. Over the course of four years, we have explored several different ICT based service concepts in field trials. The goal of the field trials has been to expose novel ICT based service concepts to everyday life of ageing users through adoption of services in real life use. As a result, rich data about user experience and value of the service for different stakeholders has been collected and analyzed. Conducting the field trials has exposed practical issues about how to conduct research with older users. In this paper the experiences are summarized. The findings show that older participants differ from other user groups in several ways. Researchers faced challenges with research procedures during the field trials. These challenges were sometimes caused by exploratory nature and limited duration of the field trial; the participants of field trials always did not want to invest on adopting the services as their everyday routines, but instead restricted the use into testing technology and related service as isolated objects from their everyday lives. Often, this also led into situations where participants judged the value of the service to “someone else”, and were not willing to adopt it themselves.