An end user and environment field study for an inclusive design of consumer products

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Fiddian;Chris Bowden;Mark Magennis;Antoinette Fennell;Joshue O'Connor;Pierre T. Kirisci;Yehya Mohamad;Michael Lawo

  • Affiliations:

  • The Royal National Institute for Deaf People LBG, London, UK;The Royal National Institute for Deaf People LBG, London, UK;The Royal National Institute for Deaf People LBG, London, UK;The Royal National Institute for Deaf People LBG, London, UK;National Council for the Blind;Universität Bremen;Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology;Universität Bremen

  • Venue:
  • HCII'11 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction: users and applications - Volume Part IV
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper an approach to improve the design of every day consumer products for inclusive design with a focus on elderly people with mild to medium physical and sensory impairments is presented. As mainstream manufactures do not have a detailed understanding of the needs of this target group the idea is to use a Virtual Human Model that covers these impairments. A Virtual Laboratory with three design phases is the approach to allow designers to plan and evaluate the user interfaces of their products. The paper gives a state of the art and presents the Virtual User Model as a mixture of human and environment context. In this paper we present results of an detailed ethnographic study. The research carried out on a group of 58 elderly people from the UK, Ireland and Germany who had a range of three mild-to-medium impairments; hearing, vision and manual dexterity.