On the 9th of February, at 5:00 pm, Sónia Machado took the Masters in Multimedia Communication tests for her dissertation “Co-designing a UX Toolkit for Senior Online Communities: A Proposal for the miOne Online Community”. In the defense, which took place on the Zoom platform, it was possible to see how co-design influenced the experience of use with online communities, analyzing the case of the miOne online community.

Sónia Machado, on the 9th of February, at 5 pm, presented her dissertation, in the Masters in Multimedia Communication, on the Zoom platform.

The main objective of the presented dissertation was to understand how co-design can influence the senior user’s experience with online communities and propose a set of good practices or guidelines for the development of senior online communities. To this end, a literature review and a systematic review of the literature on co-design techniques applied to the senior public over the past six years was conducted. Subsequently, a toolkit of co-design activities for interaction with the miOne online community and evaluation of the user experience, was developed and applied with students from Universities of Third Age. In addition, an eye-tracking session was held with five participants, in order to test the navigation of the miOne community, a focus group with four participants and the application of a questionnaire, which had 21 responses.

The results of your research question “In what way can co-design influence the senior citizens’ experience with an online community?”, among others, indicate that it has a positive influence, having contributed to the mitigation of social isolation, allowing to maintain contact and meet new people, continue to learn more about ICT and create unique moments with intergenerational contacts. Furthermore, in COVID-19 times, more than 50% of users continued to use the miOne platform.