Advocacy Through Design: Partnering to Improve Online Communications and Connections in a Life Plan Community

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Despite longstanding interests to understand user involvement in participatory, community-based research, we are still learning how including different users can influence the design process. In this paper, we share what we learned examining older adults' participation in formative studies conducted to redesign a resident-led, internal website at a Life Plan Community in a partnership with residents and staff. We administered questionnaires followed by focus groups and interviews to understand residents' experiences and concerns with the website; however, we found early in our process that several non-users participated advocating for changes outside the scope of our initial project goals. We reflect on how participation by different users, particularly non-users, helped us uncover design tensions related to underlying socio-technical concerns about the website. Our work builds on work promoting critical reflection in HCI. We extend work on participation, non-use, and advocacy in design and share practical examples of adapting our approach to prepare for design activities.