The Inclusive Design Wheel (IDW) is an established inclusive con-cept design process, emphasizing iteration and early-stage evaluation. However, a structured evaluation of its effectiveness in practice has not been previously conducted. This paper describes how the IDW process was adapted for use in the design of digital mobility services. It was then trialled on five pilot projects in Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Questionnaires were completed by participants (both pilot partners and end-users) and interviews were held with pilot partners at the end of the project. Initial insights from the pilot experiences and the evaluation are described. The pilot teams found the IDW helpful and particularly valued its help in structuring the design process and offering clear steps and tools. Insights for improving the IDW focus on the importance and role of co-creation, issues with recording iteration and the balance between structure and flexibility. Implications are highlighted for improving the Inclusive Design Wheel and for inclusive design processes more generally.

Some approaches to representing the diverse range of capabilities within the population focus on representing those with severe losses in a sin-gle capability, such as vision or mobility. This approach follows the simplistic view that people are either able-bodied, or have a single severe capability limita-tion. This paper challenges this view using data from a population representative survey of the 2019 adult population in Germany. This survey asked participants whether they had any limitations in daily activities because of their vision, hearing, memory, concentration, hands, reach or mobility. Out of 1002 valid responses, 158 participants reported that something was ‘very limited’. However, 145 of these par-ticipants (92%) had a limitation in more than one capability category. Therefore, representing the diverse range of capabilities within the population necessarily requires describing people with co-occurring limitations. The full set of capabil-ity limitations for an individual is defined herein as their ‘capability fingerprint’. Within the German survey, the top 16 capability fingerprints represented 80% of the survey participants. Presenting the most prevalent capability fingerprints is advocated as a better approach for understanding the diversity of the population. These capability fingerprints could be used to develop population-representative personas, or to better understand the sample that took part in small-scale user research.

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.

This paper presents formative research to inform the design of intelligent automotive user interfaces. It describes an evaluation of dialogue-based interfaces, mediating the driver to take back control from the autonomous mode of a car. Four concepts designed to increase driver Situation Awareness were evaluated in a driving simulator. They used dialoguebased interaction, where driving-related information was either asked from or repeated by the driver, with the alternative of a countdown-based interface with no additional information. An inclusive set of participants, with a wide age spectrum, tested the interfaces. The shorter and simpler interaction of the countdown timer was most accepted. The interface seeking answers to driving-related questions came next, and the interface requiring repetition of driving-related information, even when augmented by visual and tactile cues, was least accepted. Design guidelines on utilizing dialogue as a means of keeping the driver in the loop during a takeover were thus derived.

Despite a large literature on autonomous vehicles and a large number of relevant surveys examining public perception of self-driving vehicles, recent studies suggest that reported public perception is rapidly changing, volatile, and highly dependent on context and potential biases in reporting. In addition, some conclusions from very recent studies are supported: namely, that very little of the survey literature addresses key user centred design consideration that arise from inclusion of the wider population in the use of autonomous vehicles. We report initial studies that are intended to form part of a method currently under development that aims to bring together automotive design and Inclusive design; an analytical functional approach to design for user capability in the wider population. This paper describes the development stages of a user centred design capable methodology for sampling public opinion from a range of different qualitative studies. The finding are made available at two levels. Firstly, a general report on public perceptions’, examines key elements of sensitivity in responses to autonomous vehicle issues. Secondly, the methodology shows how to address in an unbiased way the specification and design a number of potential HMI concepts for managing takeover from car to driver in an autonomously capable vehicle in urban and highway usage cases.

There are compelling reasons to improve usability and make designs more inclusive, but it can be a challenge to implement these changes in a corporate environment. This paper presents some ways to address this in practice based on over 15 years experience of inclusive design work with businesses. It suggests that a successful persuasive case can be built with three key components: a proof-of-concept prototype, an experience that enables the stakeholders to engage personally with the issues and quantitative evidence demonstrating the impact of a potential change. These components are illustrated in this paper using a case study that was conducted with Unilever to improve the images used in e-commerce. The ice cream brand, Magnum is one of Unilever's billion-dollar brands that implemented these changes. During an 8-week live trial, comparing the old and new images, the new images experienced a sales increase of 24%.

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.

Older users with limited technology prior experience represent an important user group, in part due to their increase in the population in developed countries. The authorship team collectively have decades of research experience as well as significant industrial experience as part of knowledge transfer, conducting user trials and designing for this user group. It can be difficult to effectively communicate the depth of difficulties that older users can experience with new technologies and new technology interfaces, particularly to clients in technology sectors. Technology adoption models explain the factors that are at play in the likelihood of a user adopting and persisting with a particular type of technology, however they do not depict the temporal aspect of this journey. In previous work the user journey experience was simplified to aid comprehension from a design opportunity perspective and elapsed time. From some initial positive feedback from knowledge transfer clients with this simplified learning diagram, this paper proposes a series of depictions using this as a basis for communicating more specific and nuanced older user experiences to corporate stakeholders, principally designers and engineers.

The user experience can be greatly affected by the demands made by packaging on users' capabilities such as vision and dexterity. Packaging with features that are hard to see, manipulate, or understand can result in difficulty, frustration, or even outright exclusion. This particularly affects older people and those with disabilities, but can also cause problems for more mainstream users. Inclusive design presents a way to address these issues. This chapter outlines the key principles of inclusive design and shows how they apply to packaging, presenting a framework for putting inclusive design into practice. Simulators and personas are then described, as examples of tools that are particularly helpful in inclusive design. These tools can help to develop and explore an understanding of user needs and of the effects of capability loss on the use of packaging. Real-world examples are provided to show how these apply to packaging design in practice.

This paper looks at recent trends in automotive human machine interfaces, with a lens of evaluation from an inclusive design perspective. The goal of Inclusive Design is to ensure that the population of potential users for a product or service is maximised. Until relatively recently, automotive human machine interfaces (HMI’s) have excluded and caused difficulties for users due to visibility, reach and force required to operate controls. Over the last 15 or so years however, there has been a significant increase in control and display location, interface types and integration of functions, as well as dramatically increased potential functionality due to in-vehicle emergent technologies. It is suggested that this increase in interface unfamiliarity for a driver will cause significant difficulty and potential exclusion, due to the demands of learning and conflicts in expectation. The effects on this trend in the context of an ageing population and automated driving technologies are discussed.

Dignity is a key value within healthcare. Technology is also recognized as being a fundamental part of healthcare delivery, but also a potential cause of dehumanization of the patient. Therefore, understanding how medical devices can be designed to help deliver dignity is important. This paper explores the role of empathy tools as a way of engendering empathy in engineers and designers to enable them to design for dignity. A framework is proposed that makes the link between empathy tools and outcomes of feelings of dignity. It represents a broad systems view that provides a structure for reviewing the evidence for the efficacy of empathy tools and also how dignity can be systematically understood for particular medical devices.

This paper describes the University of Cambridge, Engineering Design Centre's (EDC) case for inclusive design, based on 10 years of research, promotion and knowledge transfer. In summary, inclusive design applies an understanding of customer diversity to inform decisions throughout the development process, in order to better satisfy the needs of more people. Products that are more inclusive can reach a wider market, improve customer satisfaction and drive business success. The rapidly ageing population increases the importance of this approach. The case presented here has helped to convince BT, Nestlé and others to adopt an inclusive approach.

His paper illustrates the use of scenario writing and storyboard visualisation methods based on ethnographic study of diverse personas, narratives, and user experience to guide automotive engineers and designers for creating innovative ideas and developing inclusive Human Machine Interface (iHMI) concepts for future cars in 2025 and beyond. This paper documents the importance of continuing visual research process based on anthropological case studies that looked into diverse persona, cultural and geographical attributes. These methods are used to visually analyse situational car use, thereby leading to scenario-based HMI tasks that can be applied to generate innovative user oriented future car designs. Storyboard visualisation of narratives is a method that derives from ethnographic interviews with strategically chosen car users from around the world. This is a powerful tool for analyzing situations, describing feelings, and evaluating the usability of functions within the car. With this visual process, future scenarios can be drawn in order to create new and inclusive HMI ideas and design concepts embedded within the storyboards to help engineers and designers’ to understand users’ different needs, exploring their expectations, emotions and motivations. The realistic details on the character illustrations of each persona are essential for better understanding of the users’ including older people, the visually impaired and wheelchair users, child and parent, technophobic or technophile persons. Each HMI concept can be sketched as required in task sequences, with detail and scaled paper model produced for detailed step-by-step design. The required interactions can be observed, photographed and captured on video for in-depth design thinking workshops. A series of HMI working design concepts for future cars will emerge from this pipeline for prototyping and engineering.

In the assessment of the inclusivity of products with interfaces for digital devices, there are difficulty and validity issues relating the cognitive demand of using and learning an unfamiliar interface to the capabilities outlined in the population source data. This is due to the disparity between the types of cognitive tasks used to create the source data, and those needed to operate a digital interface. Previous work to understand the factors affecting successful interactions with novel digital technology interfaces has shown that the user’s technology generation, technology prior experience and their motivation are significant. This paper suggests a method which would permit digital interfaces to be assessed for inclusivity by similarity to known interaction patterns. For a digital device interface task that contained a non-transparent or novel interaction pattern, then the resulting cognitive workload could also be assessed.

Understanding the number of people who cannot perform particular tasks helps to inform design decisions for mainstream products, such as the appropriate size and contrast of visual features. Making such informed decisions requires a dataset that is representative at the level of a national population, with sufficient scope and granularity to cover the types of actions associated with product use. Furthermore, visualisations are needed to bring the dataset to life, in order to better support comparing the number of people who cannot perform different tasks. The 1996/97 Disability Follow-up Survey remains the most recent Great British dataset to cover all types of ability losses that may be relevant to using everyday products. This paper presents new visualisations derived from this dataset, which are related to vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, dexterity and reach. Compared to previous publications on this dataset, the new visualisations contain task descriptions that have been simplified, described pictorially and separated out into different categories. Furthermore, two-dimensional visualisations are used to present exclusion results for products that require vision and/or hearing and for tasks that require each hand to do different things. In order to produce these new visualisations, the publicly available version of this dataset had to be reanalysed and recoded, which is described here-in detail.

Designers often assume that their users will have some digital technological prior experience. We examined these levels of prior experience by surveying frequency and ease of technology use with a range of technology products. 362 people participated as part of a UK nationwide larger survey of people's capabilities and characteristics to inform product design. We found that frequency and self-reported ease of use are indeed correlated for all of the products. Furthermore, both frequency and ease of use declined significantly with age for most of the products. In fact, 29% of the over 65s had never or rarely used any of the products, except for digital TV. We conclude that interfaces need to be designed carefully to avoid implicit assumptions about users' previous technology use.

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.