Abstract:

Online innovation contests are used for the generation of innovative ideas by involving the general public. Contributions to a predefined task can be submitted over an internet platform to the organizer of the contest. After a certain period a committee evaluates and rewards the submissions. Innovation contests offer social networking functions for participants to co-develop ideas. The interactive knowledge exchange leads to mutual cooperation and learning. Older users are particularly interesting as main target group due to their long-term working experience.
Online innovation contests for senior experts are the research focus of OpenISA, an interdisciplinary project at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, fostered by the program NRW Ziel 2 in the context of the contest Wissenswirtschaft.NRW. Project partners are the Technology and Innovation Management Group (TIM) and Textlinguistics and Technical Communication of RWTH Aachen University as well as MedCom International Medical & Social Communication GmbH and Deutsche Seniorenliga e.V.. During the project several online innovation contests will be conducted.
The first community-based contest of OpenISA (www.einfachtelefonieren.de) focused on mobile phones for the elderly and offered various community functions. The contest was evaluated in 18 user tests with 21 female and male users in the age of 60 to 76 years in three test series. The test series design differed in number of participants in one test session (tests with single participants, tests with groups of two), tasks (predefined tasks, exploratory tasks) and interaction in groups (cooperative usage, teach-back method). The qualitative data collected from the user tests was analyzed with regards to the communicative usability, which examines the matter of how linguistic and semiotic elements may enhance the interaction between humans and technical artifacts (Jakobs 2010).
Research questions were: How do senior experts use the contest? How do they interact with each other during the contest? Which barriers limit their participation? Which help do they need in order to remove such barriers?
Usability tests showed that users had difficulties to name the purpose of the contest as well as they struggled to identify and use the main functions. Users demanded instructions explaining the usage of the contest stepwise in a logical order. The main barriers were identified as lack of an conceptual model what the contest itself. A second barrier is based on trust issues about contest functions and members due to a different understanding of the contest design.
To remove the identified barriers an interactive video tutorial was recorded and uploaded on youtube. The video was evaluated in user tests with four participants. From the analysis of the results, guidelines for interactive video tutorials were derived. The recommendations are divided into three categories: Visual design (use of semiotic elements, use of emphasis, use of interactive elements, placement of elements), instructional design (instruction formulation, instruction sequences, instruction granularity) and content design (content formulation, content granularity, content consistency, optimal structure to support the learning process, support of follow-up actions).

References:
JAKOBS, E.-M. (2010) Des Nutzers Lust und Frust. Kommunikative Usability hypermedialer Systeme. International Journal for Language Data Processing, 1/2010, 7-19.

Keywords:

Interactive video tutorials, barriers for older users in online innovation contests, collaborative work in on-line innovation contests.