Design and Development of an Intelligent Moderator Dashboard for an Online Support Community for Aging-Related Experiences

Abstract

Medical conditions and other experiences related to aging can be challenging to manage for older adults and their caregivers. Virtual Online Communities for Aging Life Experiences (VOCALE) is an online community-based digital health intervention that aims to encourage problem-solving skills amongst older adults and caregivers through participation in weekly discussions. The VOCALE intervention is overseen by trained members of the VOCALE research team, known as “moderators”, whose responsibilities include monitoring the discussion platform and responding to the needs of participants. However, there are still unmet needs amongst VOCALE moderators, such as a desire to facilitate the intervention more effectively while also gaining a deeper understanding of how well participants are engaging with the study.This thesis project proposes a preliminary design for an intelligent moderator dashboard, which is a tool that can assist VOCALE moderators with their study-related duties and provide insights about participant engagement with the VOCALE intervention. To inform the design of this tool, a series of user-centered design activities, such as workshops and interviews, were conducted with current and former VOCALE moderators. Leveraging a combination of inductive coding and thematic analysis, the major themes extracted from these sessions were then used to inform the proceeding phase of the iterative design process. The final output of this project was a prototype for a proposed moderator dashboard design, alongside recommendations for further development. Beyond its primary purpose of providing a framework for a dashboard that can be used for future iterations of the VOCALE intervention, this work illuminates key insights about the operation of VOCALE itself, identifying the needs of various stakeholders while also highlighting areas in which the VOCALE intervention could be improved. Furthermore, the work from this project contributes to a broader understanding of how to design tools to aid with the management of online health-related discussion-based communities, with consideration placed on how individual user needs interact with overarching objectives to inform the experience of those who moderate online digital health interventions.