The paper discusses the challenges encountered defining suitable methods to test the hypothesis for research investigating inclusive design in the industry. It outlines the outcomes of an exploratory study with designers and clients in order to describe how the research hypothesis was formulated. The hypothesis considers the impact of information about inclusivity into the design decisions made by clients and designers during design meetings. The paper reflects on ways in which the hypothesis could be tested in order to preserve the scenario as closed as possible to the reality of the industrial process. It considers the advantages and the disadvantages of industrial and laboratory settings. The overall focus is to identify the setting and methods that would result in realistic answer to the research question. The paper concludes by proposing a scenario which could benefit from the current research context without affecting their applicability to design practice in industry.@en

Autonomous driving is a topic of extensive research; however user views on this new technology are largely unexplored, especially for an inclusive population. This paper presents a survey and two focus groups, investigating driving habits and attitudes towards autonomous cars of an inclusive group of UK drivers. A subset of survey participants were invited to attend one of two focus groups, to discuss handovers of control between car and driver. Maintaining safety, trust and control were themes commonly identified in both focus groups, while unique views and concerns, relating to different characteristics of the group were expressed. These results can inform an inclusive, user-centred design of autonomous vehicle interfaces, especially for the safety-critical use case of driver handovers of control.@en

The paper describes an iterative development process used to understand the suitability of different inclusive design evaluation tools applied into design practices. At the end of this process, a tool named Inclusive Design Advisor was developed, combining data related to design features of small appliances with ergonomic task demands, anthropometric data and exclusion data. When auditing a new design the tool examines the exclusion that each design feature can cause, followed by objective recommendations directly related to its features. Interactively, it allows designers or clients to balance design changes with the exclusion caused. It presents the type of information that enables designers and clients to discuss user needs and make more inclusive design decisions.@en

Disability data can help to predict the number of people that will be unable to use a particular product. The greatest benefits of this prediction are the design insights that help to reduce exclusion and thereby improve the product experience for a broad range of people. This paper uses a mobile phone case study to demonstrate how a set of visualization outputs from an exclusion audit can generate prioritized design insights to reduce exclusion, particularly when multiple tasks place demands on multiple capabilities.@en

Designers in inclusive design are challenged to create interactive products that cater for a wide range of prior experiences and cognitive abilities of their users. But suitable design guidance for this task is rare. This paper proposes the theory of primary metaphor and explores its validity as a source of design guidance. Primary metaphor theory describes how basic mental representations of physical sensorimotor experiences are extended to understand abstract domains. As primary metaphors are subconscious mental representations that are highly automated, they should be robustly available to people with differing levels of cognitive ability. Their proposed universality should make them accessible to people with differing levels of prior experience with technology. These predictions were tested for 12 primary metaphors that predict relations between spatial gestures and abstract interactive content. In an empirical study, 65 participants from two age groups (young and old) were asked to produce two-dimensional touch and three-dimensional free-form gestures in response to given abstract keywords and spatial dimensions of movements. The results show that across age groups in 92% of all cases users choose gestures that confirmed the predictions of the theory. Although the two age groups differed in their cognitive abilities and prior experience with technology, overall they did not differ in the amount of metaphor-congruent gestures they made. As predicted, only small or zero correlations of metaphor-congruent gestures with prior experience or cognitive ability could be found. The results provide a promising step toward inclusive design guidelines for gesture interaction with abstract content on mobile multitouch devices.@en

There is strong evidence of the importance of good interaction design to intuitive use of products. However, the underlying issue is that designers get little support in adequately representing, analysing and comparing design and user information. This paper proposes a new data modelling approach for designers, which in four distinct stages enables to assess and compare designers and users' understanding and usage of everyday products. The preliminary results indicate that it can contribute to the design of more inclusive products but its usefulness in industry is yet to be properly evaluated.@en

Touchscreen technology has been shown to offer advantages to older and novice users of digital products, through the relative ease of learning the interaction mechanisms and flexibility of the interface to provide explicit and contextual labelling enabling task sequences to be executed. Interaction problems caused by age related changes in sensory perception, cognition and motor skills are able to be predicted using the Inclusive Design Toolkit, however this technique is unable to predict usage problems caused by lack of prior experience of digital interaction patterns. This paper reports on the 'errors' that older users made in a pilot study using a tablet touchscreen device in the course of completing tasks such as turning the device on, setting an alarm and sending an email. An initial classification of the problems encountered by the users is made and the potential for prediction of such errors is discussed.@en

There are great potential benefits to a company of engaging in inclusive design (ID), that is, in designing for a wide range of potential users, including those who are older or have disabilities. Doing so can have significant commercial benefits, tapping into a large and growing number of older and disabled consumers, as well as meeting legislative requirements. However, while many companies agree with this, many still target young, able-bodied people. As part of the research into ID, it is important to understand why this is so and to identify barriers to and drivers for the adoption of ID by industry. Furthermore, it is useful to identify whether there are any groupings amongst companies that would influence their adoption of ID and the strategies for convincing them of its usefulness. This paper therefore presents the results of exploratory statistical analysis of data from a questionnaire survey of industry's response to ID, consisting of 99 response sets from companies representing manufacturing, retailing, ICT, design and communication industries predominantly in the south of the United Kingdom. Both cluster and factor analysis were applied to the set of companies to elicit groupings on the basis of their responses to questions. These groupings are used to identify four main kinds of companies that respond to ID in different ways. Suggestions are provided for how ID materials can be tailored to meet the needs of these companies, by emphasizing different barriers and drivers and their application to the particular needs of these kinds of companies.@en

In keeping with the ethos of Inclusive Design, this paper outlines a pilot study investigating how individualsperceive, process and respond to stimuli during interaction with products, and aims to reveal what occurs during novel product interaction whereupon users may posses limited, or non-existent, internal representations. Other areas of interest included the generational effect and the effects of ageing, upon interaction. A novel product is presented to a small number of participants who are recorded interacting with it whilst providing concurrent protocol and information elicited regarding the development of internal representations. The expectation was that prior experience with similar products would affect users' ability to interact with the product, and that this might be age-related. Whilst this was confirmed to a limited extent in the pilot study, experimentation provided clear evidence of internalised concept development that would, in itself, validate full-scale examination.@en

Understanding human movement is key to improving input devices and interaction techniques. This paper presents a study of mouse movements of motion-impaired users, with an aim to gaining a better understanding of impaired movement. The cursor trajectories of six motion-impaired users and three able-bodied users are studied according to their submovement structure. Several aspects of the movement are studied, including the frequency and duration of pauses between submovements, verification times, the number of submovements, the peak speed of submovements and the accuracy of submovements in two-dimensions. Results include findings that some motion-impaired users pause more often and for longer than able-bodied users, require up to five times more submovements to complete the same task, and exhibit a correlation between error and peak submovement speed that does not exist for able-bodied users.@en

This paper presents a study investigating how the performance of motion-impaired computer users in "point and click" tasks varies with target distance (A), target width (W), and force-feedback gravity well width (GWW). Six motion-impaired users performed "point and click" tasks across a range of values for A, W, and GWW. Times were observed to increase with A, and to decrease with W. Times also improved with GWW, and, with the addition of a gravity well, a greater improvement was observed for smaller targets than for bigger ones. It was found that Fitts' Law gave a good description of behaviour for each value of GWW, and that gravity wells reduced the effect of task difficulty on performance. A model based on Fitts' Law is proposed, which incorporates the effect of GWW on movement time. The model accounts for 88.8% of the variance in the observed data.@en

This paper describes the results of a detailed study which included a literature review and twenty semi-structured interviews with product designers from a large telecommunications company. The company studied has a lot of experience in product design and consistently produces high quality, usable and competitive products. In essence, the study investigated the nature and structure of users' cognitive representations of products and the ways in which designers currently go about matching their intended design of products with the users' understanding of those products. The findings from the study indicate that designers have often very little time, limited financial resources, and not enough support to take notice of users' understanding of products as much as they would like to. Moreover, no appropriate tool for predicting inclusive interaction between products and users is currently used across the organisation. However, the interviewed designers expressed high interest in using such a tool. Further research will evaluate existing tools for modelling the match between the conceptual models of designers and users and find an appropriate tool for facilitating inclusive interaction.@en

For people with motion impairments, access to and independent control of a computer can be essential. Symptoms such as tremor and spasm, however, can make the typical keyboard and mouse arrangement for computer interaction difficult or even impossible to use. This paper describes three approaches to improving computer input effectivness for people with motion impairments. The three approaches are: (1) to increase the number of interaction channels, (2) to enhance commonly existing interaction channels, and (3) to make more effective use of all the available information in an existing input channel. Experiments in multimodal input, haptic feedback, user modelling, and cursor control are discussed in the context of the three approaches. A haptically enhanced keyboard emulator with perceptive capability is proposed, combining approaches in a way that improves computer access for motion impaired users.@en

The adoption of inclusive design approach into design practice is compatible to the needs of an ageing society. However, tools and methods that promote inclusivity during new product development are scarcely used in industry. This paper is part of a research project that investigates ways to accommodate inclusive design into the design process in industrial context. The present paper is based on the finds from the observations and interviews with industrial designers and interviews with stakeholders. The outcomes from the study supported a better understanding of the client-designer dynamic as well as the stages in the design process where information related to inclusive design could be introduced. The findings were essential to inspire the development of an inclusive design interactive technique to be used by clients and designers.@en

Twelve users with a range of ages between 20 and 70, were assessed for their cognitive capabilities and degree of experience with microwave cooker features and then trialled with two microwaves, one with a dials interface and the other with a buttons interface. The users were provided with a set of tasks to complete with each microwave. It was hypothesised that all users would perform better with the dials model but that the difference in performance between dials and buttons would become more pronounced as age increased. This was found to be the case in comparing the performance from the trials, with the strongest correlation occurring between the users age and the time taken to complete the tasks.@en

A user’s prior experience with digital technologies predicts their success with a novel digital interface. Consequently, low technology prior experience can cause a potential user to be excluded from successfully navigating a user journey with a digital interface. The Engineering Design Centre’s exclusion calculator can predict the percentage of a population who will be unable to complete a task step in a user journey, but it does not explicitly take into account user exclusion due to insufficient technology prior experience. This paper develops the rationale for a proposed method for assessing the digital inclusivity of a digital interface user journey through evaluation of explicitness and digital interaction pattern familiarity.@en

This paper presents an analysis of the structure of the prevalence of disability and medical conditions in a representative sample of over 5000 people in the Great Britain 16- adult population. Using data from 1996/97 Great Britain Disability Follow-Up Survey, exploratory data analysis revealed the general increase in loss of ability in the older population. Summary characteristics are presented for five age groups and design implications are drawn for the practice of inclusive design.@en

Although there are great potential benefits to companies of widening their target market to include older and disabled users, many companies still target a narrow range of users. In the context of research into inclusive design, we are addressing this by conducting a survey of UK companies to examine their awareness of inclusive design, the barriers to it in their companies and the drivers that would encourage them to design more inclusively. In this paper, we summarise results from the first 87 companies and discuss their implications for the development of inclusive design promotion and support tools.@en

Methods for involving and understanding users are of key importance for effective and inclusive design. However, many of these methods have had limited uptake, due in part to a poor fit with the ways in which designers think and work. We therefore conducted a card-sorting study with twenty-one product and communications designers, examining their views of design methods in general, and user methods in particular. The study was analysed using hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. In this paper, we present some of the initial results, describing the main categories of design methods used and discussing the designers' views of the roles of user methods in design.@en

In the UK, only 66% of people over the age of 65 and 29% of people over the age of 75 have used the Internet. While it is important to design inclusive Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for this population, ''older people'' are often lumped together by designers, negating the diversity within this population. One important factor that is not taken into account is gender differences during learning. There is a rich history of research in how men and women react differently to various aspects of the learning experience, particularly success and failure, but this knowledge has yet to be incorporated into many ICT designs. This paper discusses the gender differences literature as it relates to user interface design for the aging population.@en