Universal Usability

Overview
• Introduce variations in physical abilities and physical workplaces,
diverse cognitive and perceptual abilities, personality differences,
cultural and international diversity, users with disabilities, older
adult users, children, and accommodating hardware and software
diversity
Objectives
• After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
• Describe Variations in Physical Abilities and Physical Workplaces
• Describe Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual Abilities
• Describe Personality Differences
• Describe Cultural and International Diversity
• Describe Users with Disabilities
• Describe about Older Adult Users
• Describe about Children Users
• Describe Accommodating Hardware and Software Diversity
Contents
• Introduction
• Variations in Physical Abilities and Physical Workplaces
• Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual Abilities
• Personality Differences
• Cultural and International Diversity
• Users with Disabilities
• Older Adult Users
• Children
• Accommodating Hardware and Software Diversity
Introduction
• As a profession, we will be remembered for how
well we meet our users’ needs.
• That is the ultimate goal: addressing the needs of
all users.
• The huge international consumer market in
mobile devices has raised the pressure for
designs that are universally usable.
Introduction
• The website of “Raising the Floor” includes universal accessibility
features such as options for emphasizing the links or making buttons
larger, offering several font sizes, contrast, text descriptions of photos,
translation services, etc. (www.raisingthefloor.net).
Introduction
• The huge international consumer market in mobile
devices has raised the pressure for designs that are
universally usable.
• While skeptics suggest that accommodating diversity
requires dumbing-down or lowest-common-denominator
strategies, our experience is that rethinking interface
designs for differing situations often results in a better
product for all users.
Variations in Physical,
Abilities and Physical
Workplaces
Variations in Physical Abilities and
Physical Workplaces
• Basic data about human dimensions comes from research
in anthropometry
• There is no average user, either compromises must be
made or multiple versions of a system must be created
• Physical measurement of human dimensions are not
enough, take into account dynamic measures such as
reach, strength or speed
• Since so much of work is related to perception, designers
need to be aware of the ranges of human perceptual
abilities, especially with regard to vision.
Variations in Physical Abilities and
Physical Workplaces
• Screen-brightness preferences vary substantially,
designers customarily provide a knob to enable
user control
• Account for variances of the user population's
sense perception
• Vision: depth, contrast, color blindness, and motion
sensitivity
• Touch: keyboard and touchscreen sensitivity
• Hearing: audio clues must be distinct
• Workplace design can both help and hinder work
performance
Variations in Physical Abilities and
Physical Workplaces
• The standard ANSI/HFES 100-2007 Human
Factors Engineering of Computer Workstations
(2007) lists these concerns:
• Work-surface and display-support height
• Clearance under work surface for legs
• Work-surface width and depth
• Adjustability of heights and angles for chairs and work
surfaces
• Posture – seating depth and angle; back-rest height and
lumbar support
• Availability of armrests, footrests, and palmrests
• Use of chair casters
Variations in Physical Abilities and
Physical Workplaces
• Workplace design is important in ensuring high job satisfaction,
good performance, and low error rates. Incorrect table heights,
uncomfortable chairs, or inadequate space to place documents
can substantially impede work.
• The most elegant screen design can be compromised by a noisy
environment, poor lighting, or a stuffy room, and that compromise
will eventually lower performance, raise error rates, and
discourage even motivated users. Thoughtful design, such as
workstations that provide wheelchair access and good lighting,
will be even more appreciated by users with disabilities and older
adults.
Variations in Physical Abilities and
Physical Workplaces
• Another physical-environment consideration involves room
layout and the sociology of human interaction.
• With multiple workstations in a classroom or office, different
layouts can encourage or limit social interaction, cooperative
work, and assistance with problems.
• Because users can often quickly help one another with minor
problems, there may be an advantage to layouts that group several
terminals close together or that enable supervisors or teachers to
view all screens at once from behind.
Diverse Cognitive and
Perceptual Abilities
Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual
Abilities
• The vital foundation for interactive-system designers is an
understanding of the cognitive and perceptual abilities of the
users.
• The human ability to interpret sensory input rapidly and to
initiate complex actions makes modern computer systems
possible
• The journal Ergonomics Abstracts offers this classification of
human cognitive processes:
‒ Long-term and semantic memory
‒ Short-term and working memory
‒ Problem solving and reasoning
‒ Decision making and risk assessment
‒ Language communication and comprehension
‒ Search, imagery, and sensory memory
‒ Learning, skill development, knowledge acquisition, and
concept attainment
Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual
Abilities
• They also suggest this set of factors affecting perceptual
and motor performance:
‒ Arousal and vigilance
‒ Fatigue and sleep deprivation
‒ Perceptual (mental) load
‒ Knowledge of results and feedback
‒ Monotony and boredom
‒ Sensory deprivation
‒ Nutrition and diet
‒ Fear, anxiety, mood, and emotion
‒ Drugs, smoking, and alcohol
‒ Physiological rhythms
• But note, in any application, background experience and
knowledge in the task domain and the interface domain
play key roles in learning and performance
Personality Differences
Personality Differences
• Some people are eager to use computers and mobile devices,
while others find them frustrating.
• Even people who enjoy using these technologies may have very
different preferences for interaction styles, pace of interaction,
graphics versus tabular presentations, dense versus sparse data
presentation, and so on.
• A clear understanding of personality and cognitive styles can be
helpful in designing interfaces for diverse communities of users.
• One evident difference is between men and women, but no clear
pattern of gender-related preferences in interfaces has been
documented. While the majority of video-game players and
designers are young males, some games (such as The Sims,
Candy Crush Saga, and Farmville) draw ample numbers of female
players.
Personality Differences
• In productivity tools, there is also a range of reactions to violent terms
such as KILL a process or ABORT a program. These and other potentially
unfortunate mismatches between the user interface and the users might
be avoided by more thoughtful attention to individual differences among
users.
• There is no set taxonomy for identifying user personality types
• Designers must be aware that populations are subdivided and that these
subdivisions have various responses to different stimuli
• A popular, but controversial, technique is the Big Five Test, based on the
OCEAN model:
• Openness to Experience/Intellect (closed/open)
• Conscientiousness (disorganized/organized)
• Extraversion (introverted/extraverted)
• Agreeableness (disagreeable/agreeable)
• Neuroticism (calm/nervous)
Personality Differences
• As designers explore computer applications for the home,
education, art, music, and entertainment, they may benefit from
paying greater attention to personality types.
• Consumer-oriented researchers are especially aware of the
personality distinctions across market segments, so as to tune
their advertising for niche products designed for techsavvy
youngsters versus family-oriented parents.
• Another approach to personality assessment is by studying user
behavior.
Cultural and International
Diversity
Cultural and International
Diversity
• Another perspective on individual differences has to do with
cultural, ethnic, racial, or linguisticbackground.
• More and more is being learned about computer users from
different cultures, but user experience designers are still
struggling to establish guidelines that are appropriate across
multiple languages and cultures.
• The growth of a worldwide computer and mobile device market
means that designers must prepare for internationalization.
Software architectures that facilitate customization of local
versions of user interfaces offer a competitive advantage.
Cultural and International
Diversity
• User-interface design concerns for internationalization include
the following:
• Characters, numerals, special characters, and diacriticals
• Left-to-right versus right-to-left versus vertical input and reading
• Date and time formats
• Numeric and currency formats
• Weights and measures
• Telephone numbers and addresses
• Names and titles (Mr., Ms., Mme.)
• Social-security, national identification, and passport numbers
• Capitalization and punctuation
• Sorting sequences
• Icons, buttons, colors
• Pluralization, grammar, spelling
• Etiquette, policies, tone, formality, metaphors
Cultural and International
Diversity
• To develop effective designs, companies run usability studies with
users from different countries, cultures, and language
communities.
• The role of information technology in international development
is steadily growing, but much needs to be done to accommodate
the diverse needs of users with vastly different language skills and
technology access.
Cultural and International
Diversity
• Designing for cell phones can open the door to a wider
audience, e.g. in developing countries where:
• feature phones often are the only way to access the internet
• literacy may be an issue
• users have very low monthly limits on the data volume they can
use
Users with Disabilities
Users with Disabilities
• Flexibility is most appreciated by users with disabilities who now
can access content and services using diverse input and output
devices.
• Increasingly, especially on Apple products, these alternate forms
of input or output are integrated into technology out of the box
(other laptops, tablets, and smartphones have add-on screen
reader and magnification capability, and a small number of
laptops have built-in eye tracking).
• Designers must plan early to accommodate users with disabilities.
Early planning is more cost efficient than adding on later.
Designing for accessibility helps everyone.
Users with Disabilities
• For interfaces to be accessible for people with disabilities, they
generally need to follow a set of design guidelines for accessibility.
• The international standards for accessibility come from the Web
Accessibility Initiative, a project of the World Wide Web
Consortium. The best-known standards are the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the current version is WCAG 2.0
• Growing world-wide support, for example:
‒ European Union Mandate 376 will require procurement and development
of accessible technologies by EU governments
(http://www.mandate376.eu/)
‒ United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
(CRPD), an international human rights agreement
(http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml)
Users with Disabilities
• A user with disability is using a television with the help of assistive
technology
Older Adult Users
Older Adult Users
• Seniority offers many pleasures and all the benefits of experience,
but aging can also have negative physical, cognitive, and social
consequences.
• Understanding the human factors of aging can help designers to
create user interfaces that facilitate access by older adult users.
• The benefits include improved chances for productive
employment and opportunities to use writing, e-mail, and other
computer tools plus the satisfactions of education, entertainment,
social interaction, and challenge.
• Older adults are particularly active participants in health support
group. The benefit to society include increased access to older
adults, which is valuable for their experience and the emotional
support they can provide to others.
Older Adult Users
• HomeAssist is an assisted living platform for older adults, installed in
homes in Bordeaux, France
• The tablet is used to show alerts (e.g. when the front door was left opened) and reminders, but also
to run a slide show of photographs when not in use (http://phoenix.inria.fr/research-
projects/homeassist)
Older Adult Users
• Similarly, desktop, web, and mobile device can be improved for all
users by providing users with control over font sizes, display
contrast, and audio levels.
• Interfaces can also be designed with easier-to-use pointing
devices, clearer navigation paths, and consistent layouts to
improve access for older adults and every user.
• Texting interfaces that suggest words or web-address completion
were originally designed to ease data input for older and disabled
users but have become expected conveniences, which reduce
cognitive load, perceptual difficulty, and motor control demands
become vital in difficult environments, such as while traveling,
injured, stressed or under pressure for rapid correct completion.
Similarly, subtitles (closed captioning) and user-controlled font
sizes were designed for users with hearing and visual difficulties,
but they benefit many users.
Children
Children
• Another lively community of users is children, whose uses
emphasize entertainment and education.
• Even pre-readers can use computer-controlled toys, music
generators, and art tools. As they mature, begin reading, and gain
limited keyboard skills, they can use a wider array of desktop
applications, web services, and mobile devices. When they
become teenagers, they may become highly proficient users who
often help their parents or other adults.
• The noble aspirations of designers of children’s software include
educational acceleration, facilitating socialization with peers, and
fostering the self-confidence that comes from skill mastery.
Children
• For teenagers, the opportunities for empowerment are
substantial. They often take the lead in employing new modes of
communication, such as text messaging on cellphones, and in
creating cultural or fashion trends that surprise even the
designers (for example, playing with simulations and fantasy
games and participating in web-based virtual worlds).
• Appropriate design principles for children’s software recognize
young people’s intense desire for the kind of interactive
engagement that gives them control with appropriate feedback
and supports their social engagement with peers. Designers also
have to find the balance between children’s desire for challenge
and parents’ requirements for safety.
Children
• Using Digital Mysteries on a tablet, two elementary school
children work together to read information slips, group
them and create a sequence to create an answer to the
question “Who killed King Ted?”
• The blue pop-up pie menu allows the selection of tools.
• A larger tabletop version allows larger groups to collaborate.
(www.reflectivethinking.com)
Children
• Designers of children’s software also have a responsibility
to attend to dangers, especially in web-based
environments, where parental control over access to
violent, racist, or pornographic materials is unfortunately
necessary.
• Appropriate information for the educational of children
about privacy issues and threats from strangers is also a
requirement.
Accomodating Hardware and
Software Diversity
Accomodating Hardware and
Software Diversity
• In addition to accommodating different classes of users and skill
levels, designers need to support a wide range of hardware and
software platforms.
• Designers need to accommodate older devices and deal with
newer mobile devices that may have low-bandwidth connections
and small screens.
• The challenge of accommodating diverse hardware is coupled
with the need to ensure access through many generations of
software. New operating systems, web browsers, e-mail clients,
and application programs should provide backward compatibility
in terms of their user-interface design and file structures.
Accomodating Hardware and
Software Diversity
• Three of the main technical challenges will be:
1. Producing satisfying and effective Internet
interaction on high-speed (broadband) and slower
(dial-up and some wireless) connections
2. Responsive design enabling access to web services
from large displays (3200 × 2400 pixels or larger)
and smaller mobile devices (1024 × 768 pixels and
smaller)
3. Supporting easy maintenance of or automatic
conversion to multiple languages
Summary
• You should now be able to:
• Describe Variations in Physical Abilities and Physical Workplaces
• Describe Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual Abilities
• Describe Personality Differences
• Describe Cultural and International Diversity
• Describe Users with Disabilities
• Describe about Older Adult Users
• Describe about Children Users
• Describe Accommodating Hardware and Software Diversity
Question & Answers