How Older Adults Communicate their Technology Problems: Challenges and Design Opportunities

When seeking technology support, the first step is effectively communicating the problem-whether to a person, such as a customer service representative or family member, or a computer program, like a search engine or chatbot.Older adults often face challenges in this process, which can delay or complicate finding accurate solutions.Through a diary study of English-speaking, communitydwelling older adults (n = 27, 57 entries), we identify four common articulation issues: verbosity (excessive detail), incompleteness (missing context), over-specification (unnecessary constraints), and under-specification (vagueness).To address these challenges, we examine how foundation models can paraphrase older adults' technology queries to improve solution accuracy.Using a few-shot prompt chaining approach with GPT-4o, we find that AI-assisted paraphrasing significantly improves accuracy: 69% of responses were correct with paraphrased queries vs. 46% with original phrasing.Even in simple Google searches, paraphrased queries yielded 69% accuracy vs. 35% with original queries.