CHIRA Conference

Planning a feature for WhatsApp to facilitate communication between people from different generations

CHIRA – Computer-Human Interaction Research and Application – is an international conference in the field of interactive system design that takes place annually. A design science study by Dr. Adi Katz and Ms. Yana Sophia was presented in this conference in 2021.

Katz, A. and Sophia, Y. 2021. A Contextualization feature to overcome intergenerational language barriers in communication apps, the 5th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications CHIRA 2021, October, 28-29, Online Streaming.

We address the existing intergenerational gaps, in technological use and in digital language, and their potential negative consequences on the well-being of older-aged adults. We describe a new contextualization feature that we designed as an addition to existing instant messages systems, to overcome misunderstandings and communication breakdowns during synchronic message exchanges. In the current work we focus on intergenerational language gaps within families, but our feature would be highly beneficial for bridging any language gap between communicators in different environments and communicational contexts (e.g. communication between employees that possess different professional jargons, between people from different nationalities and cultures, and so on). We designed a user interface prototype of the feature and we demonstrate it in the context of the WhatsApp messaging app.