Facets of prior experience and the effectiveness of inclusive design
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LONG PAPER
Facets of prior experience and the effectiveness of inclusive design Jo¨rn Hurtienne • Anne-Marie Horn • Patrick M. Langdon • P. John Clarkson
Published online: 17 April 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract Research in inclusive design has shown the importance of prior experience for the usability of interactive products. Prior experience, however, is an ill-defined and inconsistently used construct. A number of different definitions and operationalisations of experience exist, but the differing power of these operationalisations to predict the usability of products for older users has rarely been investigated systematically. This study seeks to fill that gap. It is argued that the construct of experience has at least three components. It is proposed that two of these components, exposure and competence, are directly relevant for the current discussion about prior experience in inclusive design and that they can predict to different degrees the usability of a product for older users. In an empirical study, these facets of expertise are each operationalised on three levels of specificity and their impact on usability is This article is an extended version of a paper presented at the CWUAAT workshop [15]. J. Hurtienne (&) Chair of Psychological Ergonomics, Julius-Maximilians-Universita¨t Wu¨rzburg, Oswald-Ku¨lpe-Weg 82, 97074 Wu¨rzburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A.-M. Horn Department of Business and Economics, Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Garystraße 21, 14195 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] P. M. Langdon P. J. Clarkson Engineering Department, Engineering Design Centre, Cambridge University, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. J. Clarkson e-mail: [email protected]
assessed. The results show that measures of competence predict usability variables more strongly than measures of exposure and that levels of medium and high specificity are the best predictors. The application of inclusive design principles to a redesigned version of a ticket vending machine—although not resulting in a difference of overall usability—changed the impact of prior experience on usability measures implying an enhanced inclusiveness of the redesign with regard to prior experience. The implications of these findings for the effectiveness of inclusive design for older users are discussed. Keywords Inclusive design Older adults Prior experience Competence Usability Ticket vending machines
1 Introduction Products meeting the ideals of inclusive design aim to minimise the number of people who have difficulty with or are excluded from use, or to control such exclusion by manipulation of product features [5, 23]. While previously the focus was on designing for users with highly reduced capabilities, the demographic change in most countries of the developed world makes it necessary to also look at the changing capabilities of older users within the normal range [10]. Prior experience is one of the main factors influencing the performanc
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